The Government will try to reduce the long wait to collect dependency benefits to two months.

BarcelonaLast year More than 9,000 Catalans died while waiting for their degree of dependency to be recognized.This means that every hour a person dies unattended, without having received the right recognized in the dependency law. To avoid this problem, the Government is working on a plan to shorten waiting lists, which currently exceed a year between the time a benefit is requested, the level of dependency is recognized, and the approval of the individual care plan (PIA), which determines the services to which one is entitled based on the disability. According to ARA, the executive's objective is for these people to wait a maximum of two months before their disability is recognized and they receive the benefit.

To evaluate this method, the Government plans to deploy a pilot test in the "coming weeks" in Vic and Castelldefels, and if it works, it will be extended to the entire country. This is a joint initiative between the Ministries of Health and Social Rights and the Committee for Evaluation, Innovation, and Operational Reform of the Health System (CAIROS), which is charged by the Catalan government with rethinking the healthcare system for the future. The committee's president, Manel del Castillo, admitted to ARA that the current process for obtaining disability recognition is complex, and this pilot project was born with the desire to organize and bring order to make it more accessible for citizens. "It's an organizational issue," explains del Castillo.

Thus, people who need recognition of a degree of dependency can apply either from their primary healthcare center or from City Hall. Their information will be collected and they will be scheduled for a home visit. A joint team of social workers and healthcare workers will conduct the relevant analysis to determine the individual's degree of disability, and this same team will send the information to Social Rights to process the benefit. "It's about reducing procedures," concludes the president of Cairos, who admits that the goal of shortening the waiting time to a maximum of two months is ambitious, but insists that work must be started as soon as possible because society is increasingly aging.

This Friday, health and social professionals from Vic and Castelldefels will hold a joint workshop to finalize coordination and launch the pilot test in the coming weeks. This is a further step toward the social and healthcare integration that the Government has long sought. The progressive aging of the population increases the number of people who need a joint social and healthcare approach, as older people are more fragile, have various illnesses, and require more care. It also makes it more urgent to end the fragmentation of the system and offer joint care. In fact, the Cairos plan to present new integrated care initiatives at the end of October after announcing the first transformations of the health system in primary care.

In fact, the Spanish Association of Directors and Managers of Social Services estimates that 3.5% of the Spanish population requires life support. However, More than 103,000 Catalans have died while waiting lists have grown. to have their degree of dependency recognized or to receive a benefit, according to a report by the Dependency Observatory, which collects data from 2007 to 2024. Since the dependency law came into force in the Congress of Deputies, 3.7 million people have benefited; the majority of them elderly, but also adults and minors with disabilities exceeding 33%.