Missed Nursing Care of Nurses in Neonatal Intensive Care Units During COVID-19 Period: A Cross-Sectional Descriptive Study

Abstract

This study was conducted to determine the missed nursing care and to compare missed nursing care with descriptive characteristics of nurses during the COVID-19 period. The study was conducted with 182 nurses as a descriptive design working in seven public hospitals with a level III neonatal intensive care unit in Istanbul between April and July 2021. The study used an introductory information form for nurses and the Misscare survey-Pediatric version. Missed nursing care included mouth care, full documentation of all necessary data, and communication of all relevant information during shift change or handover in the first three ranks (n = 179, 98.35%). It was found that the highest score among reasons for missed nursing care was in the communication sub-dimension (2.50 +/- 0.74). It was found that the reasons for missing care for nurses between the ages of 26-30 and with 6-10 years of professional experience (p < .05) were material resources-related, while the reasons for missing care for nurses with 11 years or more of professional experience (p < .05) and caring for 4 sick newborns in a shift (p < .01) were communication problems. It was concluded that nurses were unable to provide at least one nursing care in the last shift, and this was primarily due to communication-related problems. Training and policies for the development of communication skills can be suggested to reduce missed nursing care.