health care system and patients. This decalogue was re-edited in April 2019 and presented by the Community of Madrid with the addition of some guidelines for patients.

The Plan also acknowledges that “information in health care is part of the professional activity and it represents an essential value during the health care process that must be warranted by the organization” (p. 81) and it also highlights the importance of accompaniment and support being provided to the patient.

In this sense, information “is an essential requirement for citizens to enhance their ability to make decisions related to their health along with the health care team” (p. 81), much more than the mere transmission of contents and instructions.

The second strategic line of personalized information and accompaniment, directed to improve relationships with audiences, sets the following goals:

To develop essential institutional educational contents that are homogenous throughout the whole health care network with personalized information and communication.

To establish a program that develops the different levels of institutional information in each centre.

To optimize institutional communication.

To perfect processes that improve personalized assistance.

To facilitate the patient’s accompaniment by a person chosen by him/her.

The Plan also refers to the emergency services: “emergency care is a basic point of reference and it is critical for the National Health System” (p. 99). It is critical because access to these services cannot be controlled by the organization, and it is a basic point of reference because in Spain, while there are other health care spaces, “hospital emergencies are the most common level of assistance” (p. 99). For this reason, when thinking about the hospital’s communication as a whole, it seems necessary to address this issue.

In the Community of Madrid, in 2018, hospital emergency services attended 3,378,220 patients (Madrid Health Service and General Directorate of Humanisation, Results Observatory, 2018). It is important to consider that for many people their only contact with a hospital in years is with the emergency service alone. For this reason, the Plan considers the levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction of patients and their relatives at emergency services, based on satisfaction surveys conducted annually by the Community of Madrid. And, as can be seen in Chart 1, aspects related to communication and information are paramount.