When was the last time you or a loved one had to go to the hospital? Outside of whatever reason you had to stay there, what was the most memorable part of your experience? Typically, the first answer that comes to mind isn’t the food. Nutrition, especially high-quality dietary care, is often seconded to other, seemingly more pressing patient care matters. However, doing this has caused a significant gap in nutrition for patients.
Because of this, the World Health Organization has declared a United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition from 2016-2025, calling for prioritizing the nutritional health and well-being of patients across the globe. Although the end of the Decade of Action is approaching quickly, health problems like malnutrition, high sodium intake, and food waste continue to be a problem for outpatient and inpatient healthcare facilities.
To combat this, different organizations have developed best practices to help hospitals optimize nutrition delivery for their patients — and help inform future improvements to your dining program. Providing the nutritional support your patients’ needs has more benefits than simply meeting the outlined standards, though. It’s been linked to preventing malnutrition and decreasing mortality rates.
But before we discuss these essential nutrition guidelines for hospitalized patients, let’s consider why it’s complicated for many inpatient programs to maintain consistent nutrition requirements.
Why is it Difficult for Hospitalized Patients to Meet Nutrition Requirements?
Nutritional staff and their patients can equally struggle to meet nutrition requirements despite their best efforts. For many employees, especially in understaffed hospitals, time is often a barrier to providing comprehensive nutritional support. The demanding nature of healthcare usually leaves little room for thorough meal planning, nutrition assessments, or other dietary care — further exacerbating the challenge of meeting individualized nutritional needs.
For hospitalized patients, malnutrition, an imbalance in nutritional needs rather than just undernutrition, presents a significant challenge. Depending on their medical condition, patients often require more nutrient intake than usual to support their healing and recovery from illness or surgery. A higher intake means they may need more things like protein, zinc, selenium, thiamine, vitamin B6, and B12, and it usually requires them to eat more food.
Essential Nutrition Guidelines for Hospitalized Patients
It’s not uncommon for patients to struggle with obstacles such as loss of appetite, dietary restrictions, or difficulty in consuming certain foods due to illness or treatment side effects. Because the hospital environment and services significantly impact a patient’s health, implementing efficient and supportive systems that align with these essential nutrition guidelines is vital.
Here’s a breakdown of a few guidelines that we think will benefit your healthcare community.
Assessing Patient Needs
In our experience, the more you understand your patient population, the easier it is to identify their needs. Assess patient needs periodically throughout their stay using a structured interview or questionnaire (on paper or online). According to the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition, these assessments should include:
- Baseline nutrition statistics
- A list of nutrition risk factors, deficits, and individual nutrition needs
- Identified barriers to nutrition assistance
- An appropriate malnutrition diagnosis and any other relevant diagnoses
- Identified nutrition requirements to return to optimal health
Nutrition screenings are also important to identify people who are at risk for malnourishment or who are already exhibiting signs of it. They can be administered by more entry-level healthcare professionals.
However, this process doesn’t stop after the initial screening and assessment. Monitoring patient progress is an expected part of the treatment process, which includes a physical assessment and an analysis of nutrient intake, functional status, diagnostic test results, weight, vital signs, and medication review. Based on the patient’s diagnosis, re-evaluate the patient’s treatment plan with a qualified staff member (like an RD, RDN, or RN) as often as needed.
Patient-Centered Care
Patient-centered care (PCC) is a must when providing nutritional care for hospitalized patients. Focusing on addressing patients’ preferences goes a long way physically and mentally, providing them with a sense of identity and worth when those things aren’t often present. Regarding nutrition, a person-centered approach considers a patient’s social and emotional health and cultural factors that may influence their nutritional status and dietary choices. It also prioritizes their preferences, values, and goals during the decision-making process of developing a treatment plan. When you combine these approaches, your patients are more likely to adhere to dietary recommendations, experience improved outcomes, and feel more satisfied with their care experience.
Goal-Setting
Goal-setting provides a clear roadmap for hospitalized patients and healthcare staff during the patient’s stay. By setting specific and achievable nutrition goals, you and your fellow providers can tailor dietary plans to meet patients’ individual needs and conditions – further emphasizing the importance of person-centered care. These goals serve as ways to easily monitor progress and empower your patients to actively engage in their recovery. Whether the goal is to increase protein intake for wound healing or to address specific micronutrient deficiencies, having well-defined nutrition goals ensures that efforts are focused and outcomes are measurable, contributing to a more focused and well-rounded standard of care.
Communicating with Patients and Their Families
Communication is fundamental to working in any healthcare setting, especially a hospital. Clear, effective, and transparent communication builds trust between you, your patients, and their families, allowing them to ensure that your treatment plan aligns with their needs and wants. Ask how you can support them during therapy, what their thoughts are on the goals you created together, and what their expectations are for care. It’s also a way to address misconceptions or concerns patients and their families may have about nutrition.
Using Qualified Staff
Registered dietitians and nutritionists are qualified staff who should be on your nutrition care team. Using a multidisciplinary team is also a must, given that the specialized knowledge of each professional allows the team to address complex nutritional issues. Providers who don’t have a background in nutrition should be trained on the essential guidelines so they can work alongside other staff to provide coordinated and integrated care.
Food Safety Policies and Procedures
Following the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) F-tag guidelines is no easy challenge. While this is for senior living and long-term care facilities, many of the same guidelines are used for providing nutrition care in other settings. You might even notice some on this list! For example, procuring, storing, serving, prepping, and sanitizing food (and other food safety policies and procedures) are all tasks with specific guidelines for completing them.
Our blog about safety tips for kitchen staff is a great resource for updating your policies and procedures.
Making Dining Less Complicated
A final nutrition guideline is to make dining less complicated for your patients. Do what you can to eliminate as many steps as possible during dining. One of our partners, T.J. Regional Health in Glasgow, KY, used technology to make ordering food easier for their communities. By installing a tablet at the person’s bedside, patients and residents could easily order what they want for breakfast, lunch, or dinner without leaving the comfort of their room – and saving staff the time from completing this task in person.
If this sounds like something you’d like to incorporate your healthcare community, schedule a consultation with one of the Culinary Services Group team members today.
