Situación institucional de las Bibliotecas de Ciencias de la Salud en España

BiblioEstructura of BiblioMadSalud was proposed as a work-group to develop a structure, organization and performance of health libraries to be acknowledged by Community of Madrid administration. Start of your work with an internal analysis which result was presented at BiblioSalud 2019, XVI Jornada Nacional de Información y Documentación en Ciencias de la Salud with the title “Institutional status of health science libraries in the public hospitals of the community of Madrid”. In this work we propose to carry out an external analysis with the objective of knowing the legal structure in which the Health Sciences Libraries are framed within the institutions at the national level. Methods: A telephone survey is made to the coordinators of the Virtual Libraries of the 17 Autonomous Communities of Spain. with 4 questions, 2 basic and other two conditioned to the previous answers. Result: This study shows that only three Autonomous Communities have organized and regulated a system that establishes the mode of operation, structure and organization of their Health Sciences Libraries of their Public Hospitals. In the rest of the Communities, in the best of cases, there is a Virtual Library that acts as a working link between the rest of the libraries in your Community and coordinates some functions and services. Conclusions: It is essential to carry out a consensus work in which a legal document is formalized, supervised and approved by the Autonomous Administration, which defines the organization, structure and functioning of the Health Sciences Libraries in Public Hospitals, which It would provide stability to the system and a reference to the workers of the system.