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Nurses have an essential role to play in ongoing patient surveillance. The quality of nursing care patients receive has implications for both their recovery and long term health outcomes. Currently, due to a number of factors, nurses are facing increasing challenges to meeting the care needs of hospital patients. These include fluctuations in nursing skill mix and staffing levels, inconsistent availability of equipment and supplies, and higher patient acuity. The additional impact of healthcare restructuring on nursing has been reflected in the demand to do more with less. Consequently nurses are constantly forced to prioritise certain aspects of nursing care as being less important than others, resulting in some nursing cares being delayed or missed. In this study the concept of" missed care" was explored using a qualitative descriptive approach. Five registered nurses working within a New Zealand hospital were …