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Are Your Patients Well Nourished?
Nutritional health plays a critical role in your patients’ ability to recover quickly and to lead healthy lives. However, malnutrition in the health care setting is a critical global concern. Patients suffering from malnutrition are often not screened properly for nutritional status and are not provided with sufficient nutritional support.
Since inexpensive nutritional screening can effectively identify those at risk for malnutrition, confirming the presence of malnutrition through more thorough, comprehensive assessment and characterizing its severity can be a cost-effective procedure. For this and other reasons, nutritional screening as a first step is crucial for every patient
Who Should be Screened?
- Initial nutritional screening is encouraged for all patients in every setting, especially those at risk of malnutrition, including:
- Patients with poor nutritional status
- Patients experiencing or at risk of involuntary weight loss
- Elderly patients
- Patients without access to or unwilling to eat a well-balanced daily diet
- Pre-surgical patients needing to improve nutritional status before hospitalization
- Patients recovering from illness or surgery
- Patients at risk of fractures, such as postmenopausal women with osteoporosis
- Patients with gastrointestinal disease
- Patients taking medications that interfere with the intake, metabolism, or absorption of nutrients
Screening Tools
Nutrition screening tools can quickly flag high-risk patients for further assessment of nutritional status, such as the:
- Malnutrition Screening Tool (MST)
- Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (MUST): a reputable assessment tool for clinicians developed by BAPEN.
- DETERMINE
- a simple 10-question screening tool that is completed by a patient or by someone who knows the patient well
- Identifies warning signs of poor nutrition: Disease, Eating poorly, Tooth loss/mouth pain, Economic hardship, Reduced social contact, Multiple medicines, Involuntary weight loss/gain, Needs assistance in self-care, and Elder years above age 80
Screening tools are effective and work in a variety of settings, but they are just a beginning. If screening reveals that a patient is likely at risk, a more thorough assessment must be done by a clinician.
Nutritional Screening
Nutritional screening is usually a quick and easy questioning process that determines a patient’s level of risk for malnutrition. Nutrition practices that identify patients at risk for malnutrition by screening and assessing nutritional status, and replenishing nutrition when needed, can yield remarkable results.