Patient experience in bariatric surgery: protocol of a French narrative inquiry and qualitative analysis.

Introduction: The quality of hospital care, especially surgery, is traditionally assessed using indicators derived from healthcare databases or safety indicators. Given the growing importance of placing the patient at the heart of care evaluation, the use of questionnaires such as the Patient-Reported Experience Measures and Patient-Reported Outcome Measures has become widespread in recent years. However, these tools-addressing factors such as satisfaction, pain management or wait times-only imperfectly reflect the patient's experience, and all such attempts at patient-centred care quality assessment rely on questions or indicators defined in advance by healthcare providers and health authorities.