Objective: The purpose of the research is to investigate what does a patient want to know from the physician's preoperative visit and what is the patient's expectation from preoperative information in the clinical practice. Method: We constructed a structured questionnaire to make a survey of this research. Three hundred patients, who had his/her surgical operation on the previous day, were selected from two regional hospitals. One hundred and eighty-one questionnaires were collected. Results: Surgical successful rate, surgical risk, complication of surgery, and alternative treatments are highly concerned by most of patients. Gender has a significant impact on the opinions of patients. There are three items in the questionnaire, which are the very moment to inform the patient, the usage of supplementary instruments, and who makes the decision of surgery, have significant effects (with a p value less than 0.05) on patients. If patients' emotions are concerned, the item, feelings before surgery, has a significant effect (with a p value less than 0.05) on patients' expectations. Conclusions: There are few researches relative to topics of informed consent. As topics of patient safety progress, procedures and skills of informing at preoperative visit become more and more important. We hope that our research might make patients' rights bring into effect. And the personnel who carry out clinical medical treatment will pay more attention to the matter of informed consent. Furthermore, a faultless norm of informed consent can be established in the nearly future.