Doctor refuses to visit patient in Palma because he speaks Catalan

The patient complained and asked, at the very least, for a bilingual person to mediate with the doctor and was finally able to have a doctor and a nurse present. “The nurse did the simultaneous and unnecessary translation for the doctor, who perfectly understood everything the patient said in Catalan; and the patient, to whom the doctor answered in Spanish,” explains the language platform.

The affected person filed a complaint with the private centre, but the response of the Rutger Clinic was to invoke the ruling of the Spanish Constitutional Court which limits “the right to treatment in the common official language to relations between public authorities and citizens, but not to relations between individuals”.

In this regard, the language curriculum says that the answer violates the Autonomous System and the Linguistic Normalization Law, in addition to international regulations that clarify that no one may be discriminated against on the basis of language, but also the Health Law itself, which protects the right of patients to “receive information in the manner most appropriate to their understanding and in one of the official languages ​​of the autonomous community”. The aforementioned law also refers to the obligation of centers to provide the written explanation entirely in Catalan and to obtain the conditions for its oral presentation if the patient requests it.