Becoming a de facto couple or giving healthcare consent: the Government expedites 170 procedures

BarcelonaIf a couple wants to sign the papers to become a domestic partnership, now they will only need to fill out one form instead of two as before. And to give sanitary consent before a surgical intervention, it can now be done by signing the corresponding document through the La Meva Salut application. "The patient reads it calmly and accepts or rejects it [...] It is an improvement for patients and professionals," defends the anesthesiologist from Vall d'Hebron, Sandra Galve. These are just two examples of the procedures that the Government has simplified or is in the process of doing so. So far, it has streamlined up to 170 and plans to add 40 more that should be ready by 2028. The objective is to save citizens time in their daily dealings with the Generalitat, which the Government estimates to be around 2,000.

"We want to make people's lives simpler. It's a kind of fight against bureaucracy," defends the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, in statements to the press. The executive is focusing on the procedures most used by citizens in the areas of health, education, agriculture, and justice. "There is an excess of bureaucracy and complicated language that generates errors by citizens and the administration," he admits. All of this is part of the Catgirem program that the executive launched a year ago, when it started by "shorten the time for eight procedures that had a long waiting time, such as aid for buying an electric car.

For example, in the agricultural sector, one of the management processes that the Government has simplified is the application for authorization to transform forest land for agricultural uses, which now includes a map to facilitate the location of the areas. The registry for buying or selling agricultural machinery has also changed: PDF forms have been eliminated and replaced by HTML forms. In fact, this is a change that the Government has made in various procedures.

An application for teachers

In the management of the educational world, changes have also been incorporated. Since April, teachers can manage substitutions through an application where they can accept or reject positions from their mobile phone. Once they receive an alert for a vacant position to cover as a substitution, they have half an hour to accept it from the same application. In this way, the executive ensures that the duration of vacant positions has been reduced, as well as the bureaucracy that the centers had to manage.

In the linguistic field, the Government has changed the forms to register to obtain the A1 Catalan certificate. They are now multilingual to facilitate the registration of newcomers. In addition, the way of obtaining and keeping Catalan certificates has been changed: they are now published in the Private Area for citizens and can be downloaded at any time. So far, more than 8,000 have been downloaded.

Permits for maritime zones

This simplification is also aimed at companies. For example, the form to request the installation of a beach bar on the beach or any activity in a maritime area, such as filming, local festivals, or sports and cultural activities, has been simplified. More than 1,000 authorizations are processed each year and, according to the executive, 1,200 have already been issued since the beginning of the year. With the changes implemented, consultations with the Generalitat have been reduced by 55%.

Furthermore, the application for permits to open a restaurant or a gas station on a road has also been facilitated. According to the Government, up to 3,500 permits are processed each year for actions on roads. To make this application, the company in question will now be shown in detail the documents it needs to send depending on the permit it wishes to request, and the number of response templates from the Generalitat has also been reduced. These changes are not yet in effect, but should be ready by the end of this year.