Low-value care in nursing: A systematic assessment of clinical practice guidelines

Low-value care provides little or no benefit to the patient, causes harm and wastes limited resources. Reducing it is therefore important for safer and more sustainable care.

We systematically assessed nursing low-value care practices in Dutch clinical practice guidelines with the aim to facilitate and stimulate nurses to reduce this low-value care.

We screened Dutch clinical practice guidelines for do-not-do recommendations stating that specific nursing care should be avoided. We combined similar recommendations and categorized them by specialism-related groups of nurses, the settings where care took place, and the kind of care according to the Fundamentals of Care framework.

We found 66 nursing do-not-do recommendations in 125 clinical practice guidelines, for example, 'Do not use physical restraints in case of a delirium'. Most recommendations were relevant for intensive care nurses (n = 23) and the hospital care setting (n = 49). The majority of recommendations concerned the element safety, prevention and medication of the Fundamentals of Care framework (n = 38).

This is the first systematic assessment of low-value nursing care in clinical practice guidelines. The majority of the 66 low-value care practices are not mentioned in other low-value care lists and are therefore new targets for de-implementation. The next step to reducing low-value care should be to create awareness amongst nurses, stimulate the dialogue on de-implementation in practice and facilitate quality improvement projects to quantify and reduce nursing low-value care.