Actress Assumpta Serna has put a face and voice to one of the major problems faced by Catalan society: the slowness in processing dependency aid, which causes thousands of people to die each year without having received it. The well-known actress has published a video on Instagram where she explains the ordeal she is suffering alongside her 100-year-old mother. Although she assures that her father was “prudent” and left “a legacy for the care of the mother, something many are not lucky enough to enjoy,” she states that the family is living “an incoherent and bureaucratic hell.” Serna laments that the system “treats elderly people who have worked all their lives as a burden” and “gives priority to other age groups.” “The protocol of the Department of Social Rights is neither humane nor fair,” she denounces.
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Serna says she has filed a complaint with the Barcelona Social Services Consortium, since after requesting it a year ago they have only granted her “64 hours a month of help for someone who needs help 24 hours a day.” Likewise, the actress complains that if a family legally hires a caregiver, they do not receive any benefit. “They force you to do it with one of the companies recommended by the Generalitat, which take huge commissions […] and with caregivers who also do not have the required qualifications,” she adds.
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Finally, Serna denounces the “years of delay” to review a degree of dependency, as well as what she considers “the final insult”: the service is closed in mid-August. “It’s as if they said, can you stop dying in August? We need a vacation,” she says sarcastically.
“This is a matter of life or death for the elderly people of Catalonia,” summarizes the actress, who through the video makes a call for people to write to her on Instagram to collect testimonies with cases similar to hers and “have more strength” to solve this problem that will affect everyone “today or tomorrow.” “Together we can change how Catalonia treats its elderly people,” she says.
Quick reaction
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The artist published the video two days ago and this Saturday she released another in which she says that, following the echo her complaint has had, many people have contacted her, including a politician and a person “with authority in the evaluations of degree of dependency” who has shown sudden interest in her mother’s case. “Do you really have to make so much noise to be heard?” she questions.
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In these hours, Serna says she has received hundreds of messages with stories similar to hers, which has made her rethink the focus of her complaint. “I started with my mother’s case, but after reading comments, the goal has changed: we have to find a solution to a shared problem,” she concludes.
Last April, the Government presented the shock plan to speed up dependency aid with an amount of 25 million euros, which is concretized in the hiring of 200 professionals in the sector. Currently, an average of 397 days is needed to receive the aid and the Government’s goal is to obtain it in 60.
The employers’ association of nursing homes, Acra, presented a study a year ago warning that Catalonia has one of the longest waiting lists in Spain: 38,002 people are waiting to be evaluated for their degree of dependency, and once recognized, it takes 275 days to receive the corresponding benefit. The association also stated that 80,000 residential places and 26,000 more professionals will be needed within a decade. The population over 65 years old will grow at a rate of 2.5% annually and those over 80 years old will be 644,600 people in the year 3035, 7.1% of the population.
