Omission of nursing care in hospitalization units

OBJECTIVE: to describe the prevalence and reasons for omission of nursing care, according to the perception of nursing professionals working in a teaching hospital. METHOD: a cross-sectional study was carried out with 267 professionals from ten hospitalization units. Data were collected by the MISSCARE-Brasil instrument. Descriptive statistics and Pearson’s Chi-square or Fisher’s exact tests were used to compare differences in the prevalence of omission among professional categories. RESULTS: among the elements of nursing care, the highest prevalence of omission consisted in: to sit up the patient out of bed (70.3%), ambulation three times a day (69.1%), and participation in the discussion of the interdisciplinary team on patient’s health care (67.2%). The most frequent reasons were: inadequate number of staff (85.4%), inadequate number of staff for providing care or in administrative tasks (81.6%), and unexpected increase in the number and/or greater severity of patients (79.8%). Nurses reported major omission than nursing technicians/auxiliaries in four elements of care (p<0.05). CONCLUSION: according to our study, there is high prevalence of omission of nursing care elements from the professionals’ perspective. Factors related to human and material resources were more reported as causes for such omission.