Letter to the Editor: Bridging the Intention‐Action Gap: Future Directions for Implementing Acceptable and Feasible Comfort Rounding

We read with great interest the recent article by Becking-Verhaar et al. (2025) entitled ‘Evaluating Nurses' Perspectives on the Acceptability and Practicality of Comfort Rounding for Personalised Nutritional and Mobility Care in Surgical Wards: A Mixed-Methods Feasibility Study’. The study employs a longitudinal mixed-methods design, vividly revealing the complex challenges of implementing structured nursing interventions in real-world clinical settings. This research highlights a critical paradox: Although nurses highly value personalised nutrition and mobility care, they generally express reservations about the structured format of comfort rounding. The findings clearly indicate that ‘the design of comfort rounding is too rigid’ is perceived by nurses as a major barrier, while ‘workload and time pressure’ further limit its practical implementation. These insights provide valuable understanding of the difficulties in implementing nursing interventions. Based on these research findings, we would like to propose two promising directions for further exploration to advance this field. First, exploring the optimal balance between structure and flexibility. The study astutely observes that after tailoring the design to allow flexible timing, Hospital 2 nurses accepted CR more and reported improved performance (Becking-Verhaar et al. 2025). This finding suggests that future interventions should develop more adaptive frameworks. We propose that, rather than requiring nurses to adhere to a fixed rounding schedule, intervention components could be decomposed into ‘contextual care prompts’ embedded within existing workflows. For example, integrating nutrition assessment naturally into medication administration processes—by quickly evaluating meal intake and standardising documentation during medication rounds. This approach preserves the core intent of comfort rounding while significantly reducing the perceived burden on nurses. Second, leveraging the potential of digital tools to enhance feasibility. The study results indicate that nurses' reports and registrations were sometimes found to be incomplete, inconsistent and insufficiently informative (Becking-Verhaar et al. 2025). This fragmented documentation not only increases workload but also hinders care continuity. We suggest exploring the use of automated clinical decision support systems to integrate comfort rounding data (Morris et al. 2022). By enabling nurses to record key data via mobile devices, backend algorithms can synthesise multidimensional information such as nutritional intake and activity levels, automatically identifying at-risk patients and generating personalised prompts, such as ‘discuss poor appetite during the afternoon round’. When nurses can see how their documentation is translated in real time into concrete clinical decision support, their willingness to use structured tools and their adherence to protocols may improve. Simultaneously, providing patient-side visual feedback—such as progress bars displaying ‘today's nutrition goals’—can enhance patient engagement and foster positive nurse–patient interactions. Becking-Verhaar et al.'s study successfully shifts the focus from ‘whether comfort rounding is effective’ to ‘how to make it effective in practice’. We sincerely commend this rigorous and clinically grounded research approach and eagerly look forward to future studies testing these adaptive, digitally enhanced and humanistic nursing interventions. The authors have nothing to report. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The authors have nothing to report.