Background <p>Online complaint platforms provide unsolicited accounts of patient and family experiences and can offer valuable insights into healthcare delivery. However, little is known about what complaints mentioning nurses reveal about care processes in Türkiye. This study identified the main themes in online patient and family complaints that explicitly mentioned nurses and examined how these complaints reflected nursing, medical, and system-level aspects of healthcare delivery.</p> Methods <p>We conducted a descriptive, exploratory study of 11,674 publicly available complaint narratives posted on a major online complaint platform in Türkiye between September 2022 and February 2025. Complaints explicitly referring to nurses were identified using a Turkish-language keyword meaning “nurse”. After text cleaning, lemmatisation, tokenisation, and stop-word removal, topic modelling was performed. Model selection was guided by coherence and interpretability. Descriptive statistics were used to summarise corpus characteristics and topic prevalence. The final model identified 13 topics, which were subsequently grouped by the researchers for interpretive purposes as nursing-centred, medical-centred, or system-centred.</p> Results <p>The 13 topics indicated that complaints mentioning nurses were not limited to direct nursing care but reflected interconnected nursing, medical, and system-level problems. Medical-centred topics accounted for the largest share of complaints (43.56%), followed by nursing-centred topics (36.40%) and system-centred topics (20.04%). The most prevalent topics concerned examination, diagnosis, and referral problems (24.27%); ward environment, responsiveness, and nursing care (17.79%); and emergency department access and waiting times (13.51%). Overall, complaints mentioning nurses most often reflected problems in clinical communication, responsiveness, procedural care, access, waiting times, and care coordination.</p> Conclusions <p>Within this keyword-defined corpus, online complaints mentioning nurses offer insight into perceived shortcomings in healthcare provision. Although many complaints concerned nursing-sensitive issues such as communication, responsiveness, and procedural care, a substantial proportion reflected wider medical and organisational problems. Monitoring such complaints may support quality improvement across multidisciplinary care pathways. </p> Clinical trial number <p>Not applicable.</p>