Missed nursing care and related concepts: two decades of research and the road ahead

Research in the field of missed nursing care (MNC) and related concepts, such as unfinished nursing care or rationed care, which refer to nursing activities that are omitted or delayed despite being expected by patients (Bassi et al., 2018), is approaching its 20 th anniversary.Attempting to measure what has not been provided to patientssomething inherently invisible yet crucially related to the quality of carehas attracted considerable international interest (Jones et al., 2021).Over the years, researchers from around the world (Sarpong et al., 2023) have developed a variety of measurement instruments, validated their psychometric properties, and mainly measured the occurrence of MNC.Overall, the results have documented consistency in the incidence and patterns of omitted care across different cultures, healthcare systems, and organizational conditions (e.g., Zelenkov et al., 2023)even despite significant differences in staffing, resources and infrastructure.During the COVID-19 pandemic, renewed debate on this line of research emerged.Several studies have sought to understand whether the occurrence or nature of MNC changes under extreme systemic stress.Surprisingly, many of these studies showed results consistent with pre-pandemic patterns.These results are all the more remarkable considering they were based on self-reporting during one of the most disrupted periods in healthcare history worldwide (Sist et al., 2024).Prior to the pandemic, MNC research was primarily conducted in hospitals, with data collected through self-report using validated instruments, and the studies were mainly cross-sectional.During the pandemic, two lines of research were developed: (a) comparative studies investigating differences in the care of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients and (b) studies tracking the prevalence of MNC independent of the pandemic context.The former represented an innovation, as comparative studies on MNC previously were rare and largely limited to unit-or country-level comparisons under stable conditions.The latter helped document the persistence of the phenomenon Palese, A.