The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and hospital quality experts released Friday the first nationwide hospital by hospital survey of patient satisfaction in order to help patients choose the right place where they want to be treated.

Patients that were treated in the U.S. hospitals answered questions about whether their rooms and bathroom were clean, if the doctors were listening and understanding, if the nurses treated them appropriately, if the area around the room was quiet, if they were given written information to take home and if they were answered immediately in case of emergency.

The survey, named Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, took place from October 2006 to June 2007and included a massive amount of information about 2,521 hospitals. Its results, made public at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov., will help people decide on what hospital to visit just in case they have an emergency or what hospital to recommend their relatives and friends. This list is also meant to make hospitals compete more in their services and doctors and nurses offer better support when asked.

 “I think by this afternoon there will be hospitals looking at this site and identifying the places they need to improve,” Health and Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt said, according to WebMD.

To make everything even clearer about what the survey discovered, here are some tips for people who might need hospital care. About 67 percent of patients said they would definitely recommend the institution where they had been treated to friends and relative. Sixty-three percent gave their hospitals a score of 9 or 10 on a scale of 0 to 10. More than 25 percent of patients said nurses had not always communicated well with them, which is of great concern, according to Dr. Carolyn M. Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a unit of the Public Health Service.

“Poor communication is a major source of medical errors. If doctors are not listening carefully, patients may not bring up important information. Patients who do not understand discharge instructions are more likely to be readmitted to the hospital or end up in the emergency room.”

Overall, federal officials said rural hospitals seemed to fare better than urban ones when it came to several measures of patient satisfaction.

"I think that has to do with rural hospitals being more of a fabric of the community," said Herb Kuhn, acting deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Federal officials recognize that patients needing emergency care might not use the comparison Web site. However, more than 60 percent of all patients go to a hospital for elective procedures.

People will have even more information about hospitals in July when the American Hospital Association will introduce comparisons of average pneumonia death rates for hospitals, spokeswoman Elizabeth Leitz said.