Missed Nursing Care and Associated Factors Among Nurses in Public Hospitals, South West Ethiopia

Abstract Background: Nursing care play essential role in determining quality health care services and patient outcomes. Missed nursing care (MNC) is any required patient care omitted in part or in whole, or significantly delayed by nurses. There is paucity of studies addressing Missed nursing care in hospital setting in Ethiopia. Thus, this study aimed to identify amount, type and distribution of missed nursing care across public hospital in southwestern Ethiopia.Methods: Facility based cross-sectional study using quantitative methods was conducted in eight public hospitals found in south west Ethiopia from March to April, 2018 using a modified miss care survey tool. All nurses working in inpatient units (422) were requested to participate and 386 of them respond to questioner, yield response rate of (91.4%). Descriptive statistics was performed for socio-demographic and work related characteristics. Multivariable linear regression was conducted using SPSS version 20 to identify the potential predictors of missed nursing care.Result: The average score for missed nursing care was 63.24 out of 120 (95 % CI 62.2–64.3) and the average emerged for each nursing intervention was 2.6 out of 5 (95 % CI 2.59–2.68). From the items of nursing interventions assessed, 289(74%) of nursing staff reported ambulation of patient of as the most frequently MNC, while only 134(34.7%) of nursing staff reported wound care procedure was frequently missed. Basic care intervention dimension was found to be the most frequently missed dimension with mean score of (2.86B0.5) and individual need care intervention dimension lowest mean score (2.41a0.4).Female in gender (β = -1.828, p < 0.001), working in tertiary hospital (β = -3.576, p = 0.001) and increased satisfaction to the level of team work (β = -2.635, p = 0.001) showed significant and protective factor for missed nursing care. Whereas absent from work (β = 10.337, p < 0.001) and increased patient load (β = .253, p = 0.003) found to be contributing factor for the overall MNC.Conclusion and recommendation: Essential Nursing cares are being missed frequently by significant proportion of nurses. This indicates the need to collaborative effort to reduce occurrence of MNC and improve quality nursing care.