Table 4.

Codes Which Emerged from the Patient Focus Groups: Needs

Code	Topic	Direct Quotation
Information	Complexity of the written information provided	“The problem is that they give you 4 pages of informed consent, if you do not read the mortgage contract, you will not read the consent” “5 pages of informed consent with technical words, people do not know what they are reading, and most do not read it enough with having to go to the surgical room …”
	Limitation of information received	“ …. On what I can expect in the future, it is true that they were short of words (not to say otherwise), yes, it is true that they informed me … but telling me that it will happen as a result of the surgery … no” “Don’t worry, this is a subcutaneous hematoma, it is ‘supernormal’ after an operation …, so why has nobody told me before leaving the hospital? In the end it was nothing, but you get scared, because you don’t know what it is …” “I work, I have to let them know how long my sick leave will be … ‘about 3 or 4 days’, they told me. Three or 4 days??? I have 15 days with stitches, how can it be that my sick leave is only 3 or 4 days? It is in my groin, and I have to do a lot of physical effort in my work …”
	Assume patients know things	“ … do not assume that the patient who is lying in bed knows how to move to the chair … when I am moving, a lady tells me: “Little girl, how do you think of doing that??!!”, and I replied: “I do not know how to move!! If I have to pass my buttocks first and then … well, please tell me how!!” “They told me ‘soft diet’, but I didn’t know what that actually meant. I understood it to mean mashed food. So, I made all kind of purees”
	Person of reference to inform	“It is important that they ask for the spokesperson … One person, and they always ask for that person, and that person is responsible for communicating with the rest of the family …”
Relatives or companion	Waiting period in the surgical area	“They leave you in that room, before they tell you: ‘say goodbye to your husband’, you enter that room until you enter the operating room, but there is nobody in that room, there are only beds …” “That time, I don’t know if it was 15 or 20 minutes, I don’t know, but it seems the longest of your life, because there is nobody in that room, people come in and out from the operating rooms, and you are there alone in the bed, waiting …”
	Immediate postoperative period	“you always need someone close to you, so you can say ‘I am peeing’, or that you are having a terrible time … somebody watching you at that moment … ” “They move you from the post-operative room to the floor and they leave you there in the room and … That’s it!! It is like being abandoned until your next medication dose”
Personalisation	Personalisation	“Not all patients are the same, maybe a person needs to cry, and I, for example, left the operating room and was looking forward to standing up … ” “It is not the same for a 40-year old person as it is for a person aged 68 years who will get out of bed and hurt himself”
Healthcare professional of reference	Healthcare professional of reference	“some ladies who were apprentices came, and they said to me: yes, everything is OK, everything is OK, and they left, and I was telling myself “my doctor, my doctor … I have not seen my doctor … where is my doctor?” “My digestive diseases doctor accompanied me throughout the whole process, that is, the one that usually treats me in the digestive diseases clinic, much better than having to see a doctor, another doctor, and then another doctor …”
Coordination	Coordination	“I would have liked to have my gastroenterologists and the surgeon in my room, because the two doctors came with different information” “I had different appointments on different days, I had to go every day to the hospital, professionals are not coordinated”