[How much and how are we using the Hospital Morbidity Survey?]

The Hospital Morbidity Survey (HMS) is the only national level systematic statistic of morbidity attended in Spanish hospitals. The aim of this work is to describe publications related with HMS.

A review was carried out of Spanish scientific literature by means of an automatic literature search with the Spanish Medical Index (1971-1993), completed manually.

31 publications were found related to the HMS of which 10 are applied works directly using its results, other 13 publications deal with the quality (compliance diagnosis agreement between sources or others) of the HMS and 8 are reflections on the utility and limitations of the survey.

Despite de number of scientific articles that use the HMS represents an underestimation of the real use of HMS, we conclude that the scientific utilization of HMS is very low.