Table 3.

Themes Relating to “When” Participants Feel Communication Is Important.

Theme	Example
Frequent	Positive: “We generally saw the doctors at least once a day if not more and obviously the nurses were coming in every hour. There was always communication with the doctors for sure.” “But I do recall having a very good rapport, a lot of discussions with the doctor…”
Timely	Positive: “They were really good with my mother. If we needed to speak with them, they were always available.” Negative: “My dad always talked about having to wait, to wait for everything.”
Team initiated	Positive: “Even just stopping me in the hall when I was in visiting my mom. Just having a quick chat, talking about progress, her current state and talking about his insight into the day’s activities and sort of what the next steps were going to be.” Negative: “I would say taking more initiative to share information with us…” “The issue that I had was that really nobody came to us with the information…the concern is, is that if there is someone there without other family members advocating for them or people who are confident enough to go and ask all of the hard questions I don’t know if the information would be offered if that makes sense.”