 Hello, everyone, and welcome to another issue of People's Health Dispatch. For those of you who have subscribed to the newsletter, you will know that last week during the week of April 7th, we had a special issue focusing on World Health Day and on People's Health Day. And today we are here to discuss a bit more about what happened on 7th April this year with two activists from Catalonia. We are here with Francesc and Uri. And we are going to talk about a campaign that they organized during People's Health Day and as part of the Health Rights Action campaign. So welcome Francesc, welcome Uri. Thank you for joining us here today. And yeah, so we're really exciting to hear more about the actions that you did. And maybe I thought that we might start with just talking a bit about how it started. So where did the idea come from? And what was the process actually that you engaged in to bring this campaign to fruit? Well, Uriola and me have been working together in this project or process called Health Rights Action. And one of the things we do is to strengthen the movements for the right to health in Catalonia. We've been doing this for a while and that this means we work with a vast array of movements. And for this year 7th of April, we thought that there was room for improvement for the campaign. Because we've seen campaigns in the last years and they were okay. But we thought we could manage to do something more with a little more impact and a bit more of a collaboration, coordination between all the movements. Moreover, not only the health movements, but also movements who stand for other rights that, as you all know, are related to health. Besides the fact that we identified as health rejection, the possibility to somehow improve and do this collective thing together. And when we were planning the year, we had a meeting with all these movements. And we identified, they explained all of them that the situation has been very hard for the last months that they are really tired and exhausted and that situation of the health system after the COVID and after many political situations is quite extreme. And it was a moment for a unitary action. So it was, I think that one of the things which made it interesting is that we've had detected ourselves as a project, let's say, the need or the opportunity, but also it was something that the movements wanted to do. So that really created the possibility for a unitary action, which usually is not so easy. And what Hanser was explaining about these haka-com, as Hanser said, it was one day where our goal, our aim was to create a campaign, as we said, from zero to 100, a complete campaign in one day. Which we know already, we knew already that it was very ambitious and we didn't get to the end, but at least what we created was the common ground. There was 30 organizations and movements and collectives who participated, which participated. And what we did was to build the agreement from the ground, from the political vision, which was the first step that we did in the morning, in any case. And so little by little from this political vision, we created the whole idea of a communication campaign that, during the month after until April 7th, what we are doing this year is less producing actions. And we are more getting into the actions which are organized by the movements and trying to feed them, strengthen them, put whatever we can. And I think that this is what happened with the 7th of April and I thought it was very interesting that we really it was something which was on the air that needed to be a unitary action. And then taking this opportunity and making it grow because like it was somehow desired by many social groups was what made it somehow successful or more, we were more able to create this unity, which usually is more difficult. I found it very interesting. Thank you both. This was really interesting to hear. And now I was thinking that maybe we could spend some time talking about the content of the campaign. So if I'm not mistaken, it had quite a specific focus, which you both mentioned that was decided on collectively. And it was a campaign which focused on a slogan like this was this was not helped, or this is not helped. So could you tell me a bit more about how, you know, how you chose this topic and what it actually means. Okay, so you're this hackathon. One of the things that we came up with is the slogan for the campaign. So it was a, it was a day of furious brainstorming between activists, communication experts, all kind of people. After several ideas, it wasn't easy. There was, I was in the table that was deciding the slogan, and at a certain point, it didn't seem like we were going to agree on anything good. But suddenly someone said. Salute. No, no show in Catalan. It means this is not health, but it has like, it's like an, like, like an idiom in Catalan, which means this is not what it was supposed to be, more or less, not a show. This is not working. So we thought it was good because this, this idea, this hashtag, this, this motto allowed us to single out all the things that are not working in our health model and our health system. We could mention these things, give some numbers, some data about these things and tag them as this is not health. And afterwards, we can, we can say what health should be in contrast with these things that are not working. So we saw immediately that it had very good possibilities. And with, with, with this thing in mind, we organized all the ideas on all the graphic designs, all the messages of the campaign. The reason that we did, when I said no this is agreeing on the political vision was that the difficulties and the situation in the system in the health system is unsustainable and it's very bad. So the kind of the political approach that we took was that it should be a campaign to start regaining rights, not, and not to keep defending ourselves. And we were like analyzing that we are losing more and more rights and more and more like the system is going worse and worse in terms of public health. So it sounded like we can, we should stop defending ourselves and we should counterattack. And the campaign is like we were also deciding that the approach and the language that it should be really serious and denouncing, no, and, and that we should be very firm in the campaign that we should do that's why it's a very negative statement, but in the sense that as Francis said, we should also be giving answers. Would you like to say maybe something about some of the key messages that you shared. So you said, you know, there were several examples of what health was supposed to be during the pandemic, and it was not. And I think this is something that a lot of people around the world can, you know, can can relate to. So, can you maybe single out a couple of problems that you encountered in Catalonia when health is concerned in the pandemic. So maybe one of the things which is to be under the length of this part of the campaign is that we had this graphic designs and that together with the graphics we tried to make some of the components to combine them with specific data, so that the whole campaign would be very touching because people would understand very practically not just by general denounces which we are used to do ourselves not like a complaining about the system that working. We were sick for simple data that would show that there was a problem, for example, we were saying like in the campaign about privatization. So all of the data were related to the four special measures that we were asking. And one of them, for example, was saying that 5000 million of euros from the public health care budget are going every year to private hands. That is very well how bad the situation is, and how unfair it is, or we were also like another one, which was about privatization and lack of transparency that companies hired by the municipality to make home attention. We're taking two thirds of the salaries, which are given for the home workers. So that's kind of things that really helped explain very easily to people who don't know about how the system works. How unfair the distribution of the system, the health system is. Just to give a couple more examples, for instance, of the kind of messages we were launching, like primary health care, only 12% of the budget goes to primary health care while the World Health Organization recommends 25%. And about precarity of work, 40% of the staff of the Catalan Institute of Health has a temporary contract, for instance, or eight out of 10 nurses does not have a permanent contract. We tried to make it the most real and human possible. So besides the social media campaign which started with this awareness raising through the posters and so on. And so we had the unitary demonstration, which was happening on the 3rd of April. So for one week we were kind of building and bringing attention to the demonstration and there was the demonstration as a central act and then besides the demonstration on the week from the 4th to the 7th, what we did was creating more communication actions with testimonials on video on where people were explaining first person how the system how in their own experience. The health system is not working. No, I'm basically, I think that the relevant thing is that on the 7th of April, we had some physical actions. First of all, we had these actions on the primary healthcare centers where doctors were taking the central, how you say, microphones, the central in the centers and they were explaining that it's the 7th of April and that there is this campaign denouncing that the healthcare system is not working and that bringing all this data that we produced so that it was kind of an awareness raising for the users of the system and for the doctors themselves. That was one thing that was happening in the healthcare centers together with an action which was that using all those posters printed putting them in the centers and we thought that this was interesting because this is not the place where usually we have communication spaces and that it was creating a space for a re-indication and demonstration which was quite special. And then we made another action which we found was interesting and we still don't know which impact it had which was which we called it collapsing the emails of the main responsible people of the health system by sending them hopefully thousands of emails on the 7th of April at 12 noon with all the same re-indication. So the idea was a collapse by having hundreds of emails to the same people telling them that the system should change. And it was kind of the collapse like the system is collapsing, we are collapsing your email with all demands. So what kind of on which levels do you think that the campaign will continue and what kind of kind of expectations do you have out of it? Okay as Julio said in November there's going to be there's going to be the negotiations for the budget of the Catalan government. Okay. So we have to be approved by the parliament. So we want that the demands of the campaign are taken into account. So the campaign will at least continue until November. Okay, what we want is more people to sign the manifesto. In order to create more political momentum, we want that the city councils in Catalonia approve what we call motions in favor of the measures explained in the manifesto. We also are planning with the social movements. I mean it's it's not what we would all of me want. This is something that we have decided with the social movements to sit with the with the political representatives in order to explain the vindications of the campaign in order to try to gather support for our measures. There's a specific campaign on primary health care that is, it has been devised by Amnesty International but it's going, it's not going to be an Amnesty International campaign, it's going to be a everybody's campaign that specifically aims at 25% of the health budget to primary health care, which is one of the of the demands of a manifesto as well. And after November, since our intention is to continue working with the social movements. I think I think and that we will continue on probably preparing next year's 7th of February with let's see if we have to make the same demands or hopefully new ones if these old demands are met. The campaign has been going on for two whole weeks so it's been quite a long campaign and so what we and it hasn't been just social media campaign. Thank you so much Wurri and Francesc for sharing with us today in People's Health Dispatch. We'll see the rest of you in about two weeks and we hope to hear more about people's campaigns for People's Health Day and of their struggles for health in the next issues too.