Question

The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare has identified hospital acquired malnutrition as one of 16 potential hospital acquired complications.
What opportunities and challenges does this raise for Food & Nutrition Service Managers?

Answer 1

Nutrition is an important factor to determine health of the individual. Nutrition helps the body to grow, repair and regenerate as well as fight from communicable and non communicable diseases.

Malnourishment is increasing affecting the public health and has become an issue of concern in healthcare. Malnourishment in hospitalised patients has led to increased hospital acquired complications. The main cause of hospital acquired malnourishment is loss of appetite in chronically ill patients, taste of food and the hospital environment.

Improved healthcare technology, better accessibilty to healthcare and improved care of patient are some of the opportunities for food and nutrition service managers. Integration of informatics in the field of health care has helped in tracing and tracking if malnourished patients. Use of healthcare gadgets and telemedicine has improved the accessibility to healthcare and patient can easily monitor the nutrition status sitting at home. Managers can also keep a track on their patient's eating habits and nutrition status in better way. Increased availability of nutritional supplements and other healthy foods has also helped in improving the nutrition status of patients.

On the other hand economic disparities, wide gap between different groups of people and increased cost of healthcare have become a major challenge for food and nutrition service managers. People with low income often cannot afford nutritious meals which leads to malnourishment. Also they cannot buy costly food supplements.

The wide gap between different groups of people and inequalities in healthcare also acts as a challenge.