Nurses perform a pivotal role in promoting patient safety. Despite the nurses’ and policy makers’ effort to make nursing care safe, medication errors frequently occur. We can divide these errors into two broad categories: commission and omission errors. When the administration of medicines does not meet the requirements regarding appropriate dose, time, patient, and route, a commission error arises. Conversely, violating an ordered medication constitutes an omission error. Nursing actions have a direct association with these medical errors as far as missed care is a prevalent form of omission error seen in most healthcare facilities.
With limited research around missed care, the concepts revolving the subject are unclear. Healthcare experts have various interpretations of the idea due to its ambiguity and obscurity. Nonetheless, missed care entails the aspects of ordered patient care and medication that are omitted either in the whole or in part. Nurse-sensitive indicators facilitate the assessment of the performance of nursing care having both structural and outcome attributes. The prior includes staffing of nurses and nursing hours per patient on a daily basis whereas the latter consists of patient satisfaction, the prevalence of falls, and nosocomial infections (Heslop & Lu, 2014). Research development in missed care primarily relies on these nurse-sensitive indicators. The use of explanatory theories such as the Missed Care Nursing Model provides deep insight into the practice of nursing care (Vincent, 2013). This conceptual model consists of precursors that influence internal nursing processes hence affecting patient outcomes. It, therefore, serves as a guide for addressing errors of omission such as the consequences of nursing care that jeopardize patient safety.
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Missed nursing care is a common phenomenon in the US healthcare facilities. Based on reports from patients and health professionals, a majority of the nurses admit to committing an omission error. They often express their anger, sadness, and dissatisfaction for having violated requested patient care. After interviewing several registered and licensed practical nurses and their assistants, it comes evident that cases of failing to ambulate a patient, provide sufficient information to discharging clients, feeding them at the right time, and turn bedfast patients were rampant (Heslop & Lu, 2014). However, nurses can use the Missed Care Nursing Model to influence future research and policies to tackle matters of missed care hence enhance patient safety. The model applies to several clinical situations, therefore, it is compatible with all nursing environments. Consequently, healthcare providers can employ the model in analyzing factors influencing nurse choices (Huber, 2013). With the results obtained, factors such as values and attitudes, teamwork, priority decision making, and habits are considerable when making a clinical judgment.
Healthcare workers use translational processes to improve practice and associated health outcomes for patient aggregates. For instance, teamwork brings together several professionals to have a laser focus on delivering the best primary care hence improve the patients’ outcomes. This strategy enhances the provision of high-quality nursing care; thus, promoting patient safety and solving missed care in hospitals. Besides that, missed care impacts continuous quality improvement in health care when uncompleted or delayed patient care leads to poor patients’ outcome thereby compromising the quality of care (Heslop & Lu, 2014). Additionally, hospitals with few nurses often provide low-quality nursing care that adversely threaten patient safety. Narrowing the gap between clinical research and nursing practice is likely to make quality improvement efforts’ materialize (Huber, 2013). In the acute care settings, patient safety should be at the core of the nursing practice, and gearing efforts towards avoiding missed care would not be an obstacle. The nurse leaders should apply critical analysis and creative thinking in allocating nurses to serve in departments with demanding patients.
Missed care mainly occurs due to understaffing in hospitals. The available nurses have tasks that equally compete for their time, skills, and effort. With a healthy organizational culture that promotes teamwork, such pressures on the nurses can be minimized. Additionally, the application of the Missed Care Nursing Model would support research in the much-neglected field of nursing care.
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