Your call is important to us

Spaniards are used to queues. From 28 December the law takes a view on some of them. Ley 10/2025, passed last December, gave companies twelve months to bring their customer service into line. A caller who asks for a person must get one, and 95% of such requests must be answered within three minutes on average. Complaints must be settled within 15 working days. Nobody may be left alone with a chatbot. Most of the commentary has been about the industries the law names: telecoms, banking, energy and transport. Less noticed is that it also applies to any company selling to consumers that employs 250 people or has a turnover above €50m. That describes every large private hospital group in the country.

Those groups matter more each year. At the end of 2025 the public health service had 853,509 people waiting for surgery, a record, with an average wait of 121 days. More than a fifth had waited over six months. Almost 13m Spaniards, a quarter of the population, now hold private health insurance. Spain’s 440 private hospitals carry out 42% of its surgical operations, according to IDIS, the private sector’s foundation.

The law’s demands are specific. Customer service must be free. If a machine answers, the patient may ask for a human at any point, and the human must identify themselves. Every complaint gets a reference number and a reasoned reply that addresses each point raised. Generic answers are banned. A complaint cannot be closed simply because the deadline has passed. Companies must measure their customers’ satisfaction with how they were treated, but may not send the survey before the complaint is resolved. Once a year they must evaluate the quality of their service and have an accredited auditor check that the figures are accurate to within 5%. Both the evaluation and the audit go on the company’s website.

The fit with health care is awkward. A hospital’s customer service is not a call centre. Patients complain about appointments and bills, but also about pain, about waiting rooms and about how a diagnosis was delivered. A 15-day clock suits a disputed invoice better than a complaint that needs a doctor to review the notes. The law never mentions health care, and lawyers will argue over its edges, such as the patient whose treatment an insurer pays for. Self-paying patients are plainly covered.

The cheapest way to comply is to treat it as a call-centre problem. Send a satisfaction survey when each complaint is closed, count the answers for the auditor, put a PDF on the website. That may well pass the audit. It will also measure the complaints desk rather than the care, and tell the hospital nothing it did not know.

The better way uses the same obligations. The law makes three things compulsory: a reference for every complaint, a reasoned answer to every point, and a yearly measure checked by an outsider. Logged with care, complaints become evidence about the care itself: which hospital, which service, which step on the way from booking to bill. Read alongside the satisfaction answers the law now requires, they show where patients are let down before it surfaces in online reviews or a regulator’s files. And because the evaluation must be published, each group’s record will be open to anyone who cares to look, including the insurers that send it patients.

Spanish companies have long told callers that their call is important to them. From 28 December they will have to show it. The groups that treat the law as a way of listening, rather than a form to file, will get more from it than a clean audit.