The Catalan National Assembly presented this Thursday at noon at the Josep Trueta hospital the campaign "For Health, in Catalan", an initiative with which it wants to denounce and reverse the situation of Catalan in the healthcare sector.
The action was announced at the doors of the Girona hospital center, where volunteers from the entity distributed leaflets and explained the campaign to people entering and leaving the premises. The objective is to facilitate that those who consider that their linguistic rights have been violated can formalize a complaint and make it reach the bodies responsible for guaranteeing those rights.
A form to process complaints in less than a minute
The ANC has enabled an online form to submit the complaint in text or audio format. The entity maintains that the process can be completed in less than a minute. The leaflets delivered during the information campaign incorporate a QR code that directs to that complaint channel.
Once received, the complaint will be collected by volunteers, who will be responsible for processing it and forwarding it to different institutions and entities. Among them are Plataforma per la Llengua, the Catalan Mailbox, the College of Physicians, the Catalan Consumer Agency, the ombudsman and the Department of Health of the Generalitat.
The campaign extends to public hospitals
The initiative started last week at the Clínic hospital in Barcelona and since then it has been extending to the rest of the public hospitals in Catalonia. The organization's forecast is that it will also reach primary care centers and all health centers.
The informational material distributed at Trueta also includes a decalogue about patients' rights in relation to the use of Catalan. Along with the brochure, the volunteers handed out a sugar-free lollipop with the message "use your language, you have the right to it!".
With this campaign, the ANC seeks to create a circuit for collecting and transferring linguistic incidents in public healthcare and expand its presence beyond the large hospitals, with the focus placed on the complaints reaching the competent bodies directly.