Table 2.

Illustration of themes and subthemes by participant group

Theme	Subtheme	Intervention group	Control group	Physiotherapists
Healing	Reassurance	The physiotherapist was able to tell you whether you were doing things right or wrong	It’s quite tender…you don’t feel like you ought to be doing it…you feel like it’s too soon	They think they’re going to split their stitches…it’s just the reassurance we give
	Making progress	You saw results and sometimes with your cancer…you don’t see results until the end	I’m tender but I suppose that will go
	Helping myself	I think it was because you were doing something, because so much of cancer care is being done to you	It still gets stiff now but you just have to deal with it.	They had the confidence to do it for themselves
	Looking ahead	Now I’m just doing the massage for lymphoedema and exercises only if I feel the problem
Being the ‘perfect’ therapist		She asked me how I felt and it was very much about me and my progress		It almost like it made you be the perfect physio and the perfect way you should treat patients but you don’t always have time to do that
Delivering physiotherapy to women with breast cancer	Meeting the needs of women with breast cancer	I stopped doing the exercises for three or four days if I was ill and after that it was more difficult to do the exercises after		They’d start their chemotherapy and then it was a whole different ball game because it was just kind of managing their fatigue and we struggled to get people back in for appointments
	Emotional support for physiotherapists			There were times where it was upsetting to hear
	Physiotherapists’ time, skills and organisational integration			I would say giving them the choice of exercise is time consuming which you wouldn’t have in real life, you wouldn’t have the time There’s not necessarily the integration with like the nurses or the lymphoedema team, we are quite a separate team Being able to advise people a bit more around like scar massage or kind of…any of the manual treatments that we could’ve done and when is right and wrong to use them [was difficult]