A portion of the budget for Primary Care Centers (CAPs) will be contingent on the duration of sick leave. The Catalan Health Department has begun informing healthcare centers that there will be financial incentives if they manage to prevent excessively long periods of sick leave due to mental health issues and musculoskeletal injuries. Thus, CAPs will receive additional funding if they avoid undiagnosed sick leave and delays in appointments to assess individuals on leave and, if they have recovered, to discharge them. According to SER Catalunya and confirmed by sources within the Health Department, these bonuses will not affect the base budget each center receives for its regular operations, but they will determine whether or not it receives additional funding. The goal of the regional health department, led by Olga Pané, is "to avoid sick leave without a diagnosis and delays in appointments," since currently "many people are on sick leave for months because the tests [requiring medical clearance] take too long." If the tests are faster, the regional government argues, diagnosis and treatment can begin sooner, and sick leave "lasts as long as it should." They maintain that it is necessary to avoid "waiting five months for a diagnosis, as already happens in some cases of non-urgent conditions." The department emphasizes that temporary incapacity is due to a health problem and is treated as such, therefore reference indicators are established, as in any other activity, but always under medical judgment.

Sick leave due to temporary incapacity (TI), that is, when a worker suffers an illness or accident that temporarily prevents them from performing their job, has skyrocketed since 2017. This has been confirmed by the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) with the publication of a study on the evolution of social security coverage and its findings on this growth. Broadly speaking, from 2017 to 2024, sick leave due to temporary incapacity has increased by 60% in terms of incidence, while its duration has grown by an average of 15%, according to AIReF calculations. Specifically, the average duration of sick leave has increased from 40 days to 46, although in some conditions the increase has been even more pronounced: for mental health reasons, for example, it has risen from 67 days to 99. All of this has resulted in a tripling of spending: pensions. In 2024, these costs amounted to €16.5 billion for public coffers (between the 4th and 15th day of sick leave, the cost is shared with the company, and only from the 16th day onwards is it covered by Social Security), while in 2017 they amounted to €5.473 billion.

The importance of sick leave and the consequences of its abusive or improper use. This is the main objective of the Catalan government, which has called on citizens to make responsible use of temporary work interruptions due to illness or accident. The Catalan government, through the Department of Health, aims to raise awareness of the individual responsibility that exists in the appropriate use of sick leave, to convey the importance of a culture of responsibility toward the Catalan healthcare system—on the part of both workers and companies—and to raise awareness of the social and economic impact of temporary disabilities.

The number of workers on sick leave has tripled in Catalonia in just three weeks, as the number of infections caused by the Omicron variant doubled every week, up to almost 124,000 cases in the last seven days. The impact on the workforce is significant: between Dec 9-16, 27,249 people were off work; from Dec 17-23, 45,117 were; between Dec 24-30, 79,484 were on sick leave.