Question

Explain why a nurse’s initial assessment is so important to a patient’s nutritional status. What should be considered? Use evidence from one scholarly source.

Answer 1

Ans) Nutritional screening programme refers to the application of a screening tool in a group of patients or apparently healthy individuals, for whom the level of malnutrition risk is unknown, in order to establish the level of risk.

- Using the evidence from the literature and expert opinion, found that malnutrition screening is likely to be cost-effective, although there is still some uncertainty, given the broad confidence intervals for the clinical effects associated with oral nutrition support.

- Screening is also likely to be cost-effective for other inpatient groups, except where malnutrition risk and acute background mortality are very low.

- The cost-effectiveness of screening in other settings is harder to determine.