In the collective book Molt a favor ( Eumo), which brings together 57 proposals to increase the use of the Catalan language with positive measures, the linguist Maria Rodríguez Mariné proposes one for the field of health, which is valid for public and private : that the user knows if the doctor who is going to treat him can do it in Catalan. Today there are mutuals that offer information on the non-official languages spoken by specialists, so that the member can know that this professional will be able to assist him in his language.
Since the option of care in Catalan is not explicitly mentioned, in a normal situation of real bilingualism it would be understood that any of these doctors is capable of communicating with the patient in Catalan and Spanish, the two co-official languages in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian country. But we Catalan speakers know that this is not the case and that often the professional who attends us, who surely speaks other languages, does not speak Catalan.
Someone can almost certainly understand it, but everyone knows how uncomfortable it is to have a conversation in which one person speaks in Spanish and the other in Catalan. In all this situation, there are always the arsonists who can't stand that there are those who try to speak in Catalan while we can all understand each other in Spanish, because they don't understand that the only thing Catalan-speakers want is to keep their language alive, which is increasingly found in danger of recession But in the case of health, as in many other areas of society, it is necessary to differentiate who provides a service and who receives it.
Because the issue is complicated when the person seen by the doctor is a child, who perhaps only expresses himself in the family language and the parent is forced to act as an interpreter for the pediatrician's questions, or an elderly person with memory problems, that they have to make double the effort of answering the doctor's questions and, furthermore, doing so in a language that is not their mother tongue.
If we talk about language rights, every citizen has the right to use any of the official languages. Now, this premise can only be fulfilled if we differentiate between the person who requires a service and the person who provides it. When someone purchases a product or contracts a service, they are a user, while the person who sells that product or offers that service is the server that has to make it easier for the user to use the language they want. We are all citizens, but when a transaction takes place, who receives the service is the one who should have linguistic priority, not who is giving it.
