The warnings from the Valedora do Pobo – Galicia’s equivalent to the Ombudsman – for non-compliance with transparency are accumulating in some offices of the Xunta. The Transparency Commission, which depends on this body, has just reprimanded the Ministry of Health because it has not even responded to a request for information about patient complaints received by the Galician Health Service (Sergas). In a letter dated November 8, I demanded that he communicate a reasoned resolution within a period of 10 days, but the regional administration has not done so.
The petition requested data on complaints in Galician public health between the years 2019 and 2023, with specific information about each center and how many of the letters refer to waiting lists. After a month, the Xunta had not responded. That is the maximum period established by the Galician transparency law to notify resolutions. If in that period there is no express communication, he adds, “it will be understood that the request has been rejected.” And, when this happens, the rule allows you to request protection from the Transparency Commission, which in this case accepted the complaint due to the administration’s silence and asked about the case at the end of July.
The response reached Valedora almost three months later, according to the document from the Transparency Commission. The Xunta indicates in that response that claims, complaints and suggestions about health come to it through “multiple channels and organizations in the different areas and centers” and that, for this reason, it cannot make “a unified exploitation of the information with guarantees.” ”. That is, Sergas alleges that it has not systematized the classification and organization of the complaints it receives. And he adds that, to answer the questions, he would have to reprocess the information – one of the reasons stated in the law to deny access to data -, extract data from different channels and process it to guarantee its consistency.
The Transparency Commission replies to the Xunta that the right of citizens to request information based on transparency laws – there is a state law and a Galician law – “implies the right to receive a documented, complete and satisfactory response.” He reasons that this type of response is “an indispensable tool to be able to exercise control over public action.” Taking it to this case, he considers that the Ministry of Health must issue an “express resolution” on a request about which it has limited itself to remaining silent. If there are “limits or causes of inadmissibility for processing,” he adds, they must be justified.
The letter reminds Sanidade that state law considers a serious infraction to repeatedly fail to comply with the obligation to resolve petitions on time. In the resolution, the Commission asks the Xunta to give a response within a period of 10 days, but after this warning it has not provided either the requested data or a resolution in which access is denied.
Other obstacles to transparency
Two laws regulate transparency procedures: the state one, from 2013, and a Galician one, from 2016. But, despite the declarations of intentions of both regulations, requests for information to the Xunta often encounter different obstacles: delays in months, lack of response or opaque or partial responses. To try to obtain the data when there is no response from the Galician Government or it is not considered sufficient, the usual resource is to file a complaint with the Transparency Commission, although the reprimands from the body dependent on the Valedora are not always a guarantee that the information will be Deliver clearly.
The president of the Xunta himself, Alfonso Rueda, admitted that his team can improve in terms of transparency. He did so after Valedora sent a letter reprimanding the Galician administration for hiding data on new or rehabilitated public housing. This opacity contrasts with the campaign, with weekly announcements, about progress towards the goal of doubling the number of public apartments in the community by 2028. The commitment, assumed by Rueda in the regional campaign of February 2024, is to reach 8,000, after years of management in which the matter received hardly any attention from the Galician Government. Their data on the previous period – since 2009, when Feijóo arrived at the Xunta – were global and did not distinguish between the projects that the bipartite team of PSOE and BNG had left in motion and those started later. Nor were the figures for apartments for social emergency clarified, despite, once again, the Valedora’s warnings.
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