ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Missed nursing care is a global phenomenon affecting patient safety and quality of care. The working environment of nurses seems to play an important role in missed nursing care. AIMS: This study was conceptualized to explore the link of environmental constraints with missed nursing care in the Indian context. METHOD: A convergent mixed-method design was adopted, and data was collected using Kalisch's MISSCARE survey from 205 randomly selected nurses involved in direct patient care in the acute care settings of four tertiary care hospitals in India. In the qualitative phase, in-depth interviews regarding nurses' experience of missed care were performed with 12 nurses chosen by maximum variant sampling from the quantitative sample. RESULTS: The integrated results revealed that nurses experience a sense of competing priority in the environment where curative and prescribed tasks like medication administration get more priority than activities like communication, discharge teaching, oral hygiene, and emotional support, which are frequently missed. The human resource and communication constraints together explained 40.6% of variance in missed nursing care. Human resource inadequacy in times of increased workload was the most frequently cited reason for missed care. Converging with this finding, nurses in the interviews expressed that maintaining a flexible number of staff and catering to the variable workload can effectively reduce missed nursing care. Frequent interruption of nursing activities by medical staff and lack of structure in some activities were cited as important reasons for missed care. LINKING EVIDENCE TO ACTION: Nursing leaders need to acknowledge missed care in nursing and develop policies to maintain flexible staffing based on situational workload. Methods of staffing like NHPPD (Nursing hour per patient day) which are more sensitive to nursing workload, and patient turnover, can be adopted instead of a fixed nurse-patient mandate. Mutual support from team members and multi-professional cooperation can reduce frequent interruption of nursing tasks thereby reducing missed care.
Subject(s)
Nursing Care , Nursing Staff, Hospital , Humans , Workload , Surveys and Questionnaires , Workplace/psychology , India , Nursing Staff, Hospital/psychologyABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Rationing of care in nursing is nurses' inability to complete all care activities for patients because of scarcity in time and resource. Literature suggests that rationing of care is closely related to patient safety and quality of care. The phenomena have been defined and studied from varied perspectives and contexts. A systematic review of studies related to the concept was aimed at identifying and synthesizing the finding. METHODS: The review followed Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis guidelines, and literature searches were conducted in MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycInfo, Web of Science and EMBASE databases. Fifty-seven quantitative studies were included in the review. FINDINGS: The review observed that nursing activities addressing the emotional, educational, mobility and hygiene needs of the patients were commonly rationed. Antecedents of rationing included resource inadequacy and organizational work environment. Rationing influenced patient satisfaction, mortality and a number of adverse events and was associated with decreased job satisfaction, increased intention to leave and high turnover among nurses. DISCUSSIONS: This review concludes that rationing in nursing is ubiquitous, embedded in the work environment and poses a threat to the professional health and philosophical base of nursing in addition to having serious implications on patients' safety. Strategies to reframe and reconsider organizational traits, and open discussion with other healthcare stakeholders can reduce rationing of nursing care. The review suggests future researchers adopt different methodological layout to study rationing.
