Introduction 

Globally, nurses constitute the largest segment of healthcare professionals; therefore, they are also the most expensive, and in a hospital these costs can reach 25% of the total expenditure.1 When costs are calculated, usually the monthly sum of nursing working hours and nursing labour costs is divided by the total number of patient days to produce mean general measures such as ‘nursing hours per patient’ or ‘nursing costs per patient day.’ This is only a general average cost calculation that takes into account large groups of nurses caring for large groups of patients, but through this system it is difficult to accurately control costs if the specific costs are unknown.2 In this regard, Needleman3 pointed to the ‘invisibility’ of a significant portion of nursing today, which explains why this discipline in many countries around the world is still not fully recognised by administrators, policymakers and the public. Invisible work includes monitoring patients, educating patients and families, preparing discharge plans, providing psychological support to patients who are seriously ill and their family members, and advocating for their patients.

In the last few decades, the decreasing lengths of hospital stay of increasingly acute inpatients have been putting strong pressure in terms of time and intensity of care on nurses and this is inevitably leading to missed care.4 5 Missed care is an error of omission, defined as ‘any aspect of required care that is omitted either in part or in whole, or delayed.’6 In 2009, Kalisch and Williams also developed and validated a tool to measure missed care.6 Therefore, missed care is linked to the concept of ‘Complexity Compression,’7 which has been described as ‘what nurses experience when expected to assume additional, unplanned responsibilities while simultaneously conducting their multiple responsibilities in a condensed time frame.’8 …