Explaining the experiences of nurses regarding strategies to prevent missed nursing care: A qualitative study

To describe the experiences of nurses regarding strategies to prevent missed nursing care.

One of the global challenges is missed nursing care, which includes missed or delayed care. This problem puts patients' clinical outcome at risk, so understanding nurses' experiences of how to prevent or reduce it can help the health care policymakers.

In this qualitative descriptive study, 14 nurses were selected by purposive sampling. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data. The Graneheim and Lundman's approach of qualitative content analysis was used for data analysis. MAXQDA (version 10) software was used for data management.

The extracted codes were summarized into seven categories and one theme. The categories included "empowering nurses," "manpower supply," "supervision," "specializing the activities," "providing resources and facilities," "encouraging teamwork," and "resolving dissatisfaction." The main theme was "missed nursing care prevention strategies."

The frequency of missed nursing care can be reduced or prevented using management strategies such as paying attention to nurses "empowerment, increasing nurses" job satisfaction, normalizing nurses' salaries, providing equipment and facilities, and monitoring nurses' performance. Experimental studies are recommended to evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies.

Nursing managers can take steps such as workplace improvement, reducing nurses' workload, and empowering nurses to reduce or eliminate missed care.