Marta Arocha, Director-General of Dependence and Disability of the Government of the Canary Islands: “We must be brave with the benefits catalogue that we want for the future”

Marta Arocha, Director-General of Dependence and Disability of the Government of the Canary Islands, welcomes us in mid-June, stack of documents full of data in hand (“lately it seems that everyone knows dependence, and everybody provides data”) with the intention to lay the foundations of our interview on facts and not on opinions. And this marks an interview with two well-differentiated parts. First, we dig deep into Marta Arocha’s desire to set a clear starting point: “the progression of Dependence in the Canary Islands in 2022 is very positive, with statistical data taken from the Imserso [Institute for the Elderly and Social Services], it’s not because I say so.” Secondly, we approach aspects like digital transformation and startups that revolutionize the teleservice sector or the active ageing.

“In order to see the evolution of Dependence in the Canary Islands in 2022, we come from having a total of 1,752 Individual Attention Programmes (PIA) requests in 2019. In 2020, since I think everything must be said, there were 1,680. In 2021, there were 1,717 requests. Now we’re getting to 2022 and in 5 months we’ve exceeded the PIA requests that we received any of the previous years throughout the whole year”, highlights the Director-General of Dependence and Disability of the Government of the Canary Islands.

“I think that in the Dependence system’s evolution through 2022 we can identify a positive evolution, though there’s still a long way to go. However, we’re starting to take off and to see the light at the end of the tunnel. To manage to cater for 1,000 people through 6, 7, 8 months, is definitely an actually large number of people. I think that by June we will have managed to cater for as many people in the Canary Islands as the sum of the two previous years in total, and I think that’s a very important thing to say. We need to start creating a positive dynamic in Dependence”, states Marta Arocha.

“We need to join all of our political forces and really speak about the importance that dependence has. For various reasons—the first being, obviously, the fact that we take care of people who deserve it. But also because we’re using social benefits in this moment in the Canary Islands, which are job generators and which create jobs in a real, significant manner. We’re focusing a lot on economic benefits, not only to take care of the family environment, but also to offer the benefit linked to the service. This aid involves a quantity of up to 750 euros, which we will have to improve—of course-, but which generates employment, and that is very important”, claims Arocha.

“I’m talking about the importance of the law of dependence. Everyone calls it that way, but it actually has a name and a surname: Law of Promotion of Personal Autonomy and Attention to the Dependent People. The law’s philosophy is to keep people in the best conditions for as long as possible and in their usual environment. How do we achieve that? With active policies, with active ageing policies. The one that we know as law of dependence has marked my professional life and I transmitted that even at the [Santa Cruz de Tenerife] town hall when I carried social policies because they allowed me to promote that first part of the law, the promotion of personal autonomy”, said the Director-General of regional Dependence and Disability.

For Marta Arocha, “in the Canary Islands we are in a situation so complicated that the dependent, when they’re serviced, they’re normally in situations of major dependency, so we can’t approach the first part of the law, the promotion of personal autonomy. Catering to people before reaching that type of ageing is so great. That thing that we used to do at the town hall, active ageing policies. Of course, all of this has to do with whether we manage to work with those people in a first moment, with day-care centres, with services for the promotion of personal autonomy… We could reach a population that ages later and in a better way. We are working for that first part of the law and that philosophy. It is true that a law that delivers services in which we read about socio-sanitary centres, but that is not the actual philosophy of the law. Its philosophy is to reach that previous step of taking care of people within their environment in the best conditions possible; not taking them out of their home, but to keep them at their home, in their environment, in good conditions, and that is what gives us that first part of the law”.

“Lay the foundations with a future vision, a vision of new concepts” 

In this part of the interview, we are already turning to the side of digital transformation and the innovation that startups bring. Marta Arocha highlights: “in the Canary Islands we find ourselves in a disadvantaged situation, and we’re so far behind in comparison to other autonomous communities that when we speak about digital innovation, when we speak about policies that are more evolved, I feel vertigo, since we need to lay the foundations. But it is true that we need to lay the foundations with more of a future vision, a vision of new concepts”.

“During the meetings that I have with the CERMI (Spanish Committee of Representatives for the Disabled) we end up having the conclusion that we need to be brave, that we had to start including in the catalogue the future that we want for the Canary Islands, without forgetting the fact that we lack a lot of foundation. In dependence, in disability, it is very hard for us to go a little further”.

“I go to meetings with other autonomous communities, and they are talking about advanced teleservice, and I’m crossing my fingers so that the technical specifications of my basic teleservice arrive and that I can reach as many Canarians as possible. But I don’t want to forget the possibility to carry out advanced teleservice projects like the ones we are about to carry out, for example, in Lanzarote. It is true that we are starting at a complicated situation, but we need to try to get further. We can’t stick to that ‘The Canary Islands are the autonomous community with the worst backwardness in Spain’ thing. We need to try to serve the largest amount of people possible, and meanwhile try to progress into innovative policies”.

For Marta Arocha, “right now it is a highly important moment for us in terms of disability. We are making a diagnosis of what is the dependence situation. Once we have that diagnosis, it is going to help us determine possible solutions in terms of disability. It is a moment in which the approach to disability is open to innovate, to take a step further in the Canary Islands”.

“Not all disabled people need the same things. There are disabled people who need quite the opposite to what we’re giving them, not those assisting or aiding policies. I will give you an example: we are ready for a project for the International Disability Day in December, and the title is going to be ‘Women with great abilities’, since I think, in the end, disabled people are people with great abilities, people who develop other abilities to help with the handicap that they have”, concludes the Director-General of Regional Dependence and Disability.

 Translated by Andrea Expósito Santana