During their clinical rotations, nursing students are exposed to real situations, and, alongside good examples of clinical practice, they might also witness examples of poor practice that may threaten patient safety (Ion et al., 2015). Among several experienced nursing practices, missed nursing care (MNC), or any aspect of required nursing care that is omitted (in part or in whole) or delayed (Kalisch, 2006) -also known as care left undone, rationing of nursing care and unfinished nursing care (Bassi et al., 2018) -which leads to negative outcomes (Jones et al., 2019) might be witnessed by nursing students.As documented, students have developed a progressive awareness that MNC exists as an expression of the gap between theory and practice (Greenway et al., 2019). It has also been reported that students have learned that no nurse would intentionally miss nursing care, but sometimes this can happen due to many competitive interventions and priorities (Gibbon & Crane, 2018). In witnessing MNC episodes, students experienced a cognitive dissonance threatening their professional and personal values (Bagnasco et al., 2017) and felt negative emotions (Gibbon & Crane, 2018).At the same time, however, nursing students struggle to express criticism because this can affect their internship evaluations (Ion