Missed Nursing Care in Austria
Missed Nursing Care in Austrian Hospitals: An Assessment of the Current Situation
The topic
The phenomenon of implicit rationing of nursing activities is currently more relevant than ever due to the staff shortage in nursing and the COVID-19-related challenges in health care.
Implicit rationing of nursing activities means that nurses in hospitals repeatedly have to omit necessary nursing activities or cannot complete them or can only do so with delay due to increased demands, shortages of staff, materials and resources as well as challenges in interprofessional cooperation.
This phenomenon is described in the literature as Missed Nursing Care.
The aim
The research project MissCare-Austria pursues the general goal of characterising Missed Nursing Care in adult patients in acute inpatient settings on Austrian general wards.
Concrete goals are:
- The development of an instrument for the assessment of Missed Nursing Care in medical and/or surgical general wards for adult patients in Austrian hospitals
- The analysis of the current situation regarding Missed Nursing Care in Austrian hospitals
- The identification of factors influencing the frequency of Missed Nursing Care in Austrian hospitals.
This project will generate initial findings on which the future development of practical strategies for optimising nursing care in the acute setting can be based.
The method
The research project is divided into two phases:
In the first phase, the questionnaire "revised MISSCARE Survey" (Dabney et al. 2019) was translated from English into German in several steps using the TRAPD method (Harkness, 2008; Behr et al., 2015) and adapted for the specific conditions in Austria and tested with nursing professionals.
In the second phase, an Austria-wide online-based written structured questionnaire survey was conducted using this instrument (cross-sectional study). Subsequently, the results were analysed descriptively and comparatively. Finally, analytical statistical models are calculated to depict the factors influencing missed nursing care in general wards in Austrian hospitals.
