Missed nursing care: a concept analysis

This paper is a report of the analysis of the concept of missed nursing care.

According to patient safety literature, missed nursing care is an error of omission. This concept has been conspicuously absent in quality and patient safety literature, with individual aspects of nursing care left undone given only occasional mention. METHOD: An 8-step method of concept analysis - select concept, determine purpose, identify uses, define attributes, identify model case, describe related and contrary cases, identify antecedents and consequences and define empirical referents - was used to examine the concept of missed nursing care. The sources for the analysis were identified by systematic searches of the World Wide Web, MEDLINE, CINAHL and reference lists of related journal articles with a timeline of 1970 to April 2008.