[Contribution of Galician hospitals to national and international Internal Medicine scientific meetings].

Objectives: To evaluate the scientific contributions of internal medicine services from Galicia to nationals and internationals specialty meetings and to describe theirs preferences in clinical research.
Material and Method: We analysed the communications from the Abstracts books of the last four Spanish Internal Medicine National Congress (1994-2000 period) in comparison with that of 1984, the last two European Congress (1999 and 2001) and the last World Congress (2000). Case reports were excluded.
Results: An increasing number of communicating hospitals and a sustained number of reports was observed with a minimum of 2 hospitals (1984) to a maximum of 12 (1996) with 5-6 hospitals on average. Number of communications became stable and reached 5% of the whole spanish reports. Cardiovascular and AIDS-Infectious diseases were the preferred research fields.
Conclusions: An increment of scientific communications from a growing number of galician hospitals was observed. This scientific production became continuous and stabilized notoriously on cardiovascular and AIDS-infectious disease fields.