STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY
We investigated a large sample of a broad general medicine population from multiple centres.Only Swiss teaching hospitals were included, which might cause selection bias and limit the generalisability of the findings.Ward rounds of clinical practice procedures in the three participating hospitals were not standardised to ensure external validity—which may therefore reduce the internal validity.The questionnaire used to assess patients’ perceptions has not yet been validated.As there is no universal definition for sensitive topics, different predefined sensitive topics have been pooled into a combined variable, which is a limitation of this study.