Linking nurse practice environment, safety climate and job dimensions to missed nursing care

This study examined the aspects of the nurse practice environment and patient safety climate and the various job dimensions that contribute to the occurrence of missed nursing care.

Missed nursing care is a crucial healthcare concern that poses significant threats to patient safety. The available literature on missed nursing care is confined to high-resource nations, where hospital policies, mechanisms and processes to support professional nursing practice are well established.

This is a multi-centre, cross-sectional study, using self-report scales, which involves 624 clinical nurses in selected hospitals in the Philippines.

Patient safety climate (β = -0.148, p = 0.001), decision authority (β = -0.101, p = 0.018) and staffing/resource adequacy (β = -0.086, p = 0.014) significantly predicted missed nursing care. Nurse, unit and hospital variables were not related with missed nursing care.

Nurses who perceived greater decision authority, positive safety climate and adequate staffing/resources were less likely to miss or omit patient care activities.

Institutional measures to foster decision authority in nurses, improve safety climate and address staffing/resource issues can be a viable solution to reduce the occurrence of missed nursing care.