Acute Care Theory
Nutrition is a very important and essential part in everyone’s everyday life. However, when it comes to acute care hospitals, long-term acute care in particular, proper intake of food and water can be highly needed in order for a patient to become healthy and be able to return to his or her everyday life outside of the acute care hospital facility. Obesity became a big problem for many developed nations, however malnutrition reported in hospital patients still remains a prevalent issue, that has to be solved in order to improve the quality of acute care and nutritional care in particular (WHO, 2010). According to Florence Nightingale’s theory, nutritional care is one of the major factors that plays an important role in healing of the patients.
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According to the research, malnutrition affects 20 to 50 percent of the patients (Agarwal, Ferguson, Banks, Bauer, Capra, & Isenring, 2012). This is a problem which most of the time goes unrecognized by the hospitals and other acute care facilities. However untreated malnutrition is associated with number of negative consequences such as delayed wound healing, increased infection rates, functional decline, increased length of stay in the hospital and increased mortality (Shepherd, 2011). Dieticians from 56 hospitals in New Zeeland and Australia performed a research on this subject by performing screening of the patients for malnutrition using Malnutrition Screening tool (Agarwal et al., 2012). Dieticians recorded patients’ dietary intake at each time of the day they had a main meal and snacks (Agarwal et al., 2012). From 3122 participants in this experiment, forty-one percent were at risk of malnutrition and overall malnutrition prevalence was at thirty-two percent (Agarwal et al., 2012). Fifty-five percent of malnourished patients and thirty-five percent of well-nourished patients were consuming less than half of the food offered, stating that they were not hungry (Agarwal et al., 2012). As you can see, despite the fact that somebody who is
According to the research, malnutrition affects 20 to 50 percent of the patients (Agarwal, Ferguson, Banks, Bauer, Capra, & Isenring, 2012). This is a problem which most of the time goes unrecognized by the hospitals and other acute care facilities. However untreated malnutrition is associated with number of negative consequences such as delayed wound healing, increased infection rates, functional decline, increased length of stay in the hospital and increased mortality (Shepherd, 2011). Dieticians from 56 hospitals in New Zeeland and Australia performed a research on this subject by performing screening of the patients for malnutrition using Malnutrition Screening tool (Agarwal et al., 2012). Dieticians recorded patients’ dietary intake at each time of the day they had a main meal and snacks (Agarwal et al., 2012). From 3122 participants in this experiment, forty-one percent were at risk of malnutrition and overall malnutrition prevalence was at thirty-two percent (Agarwal et al., 2012). Fifty-five percent of malnourished patients and thirty-five percent of well-nourished patients were consuming less than half of the food offered, stating that they were not hungry (Agarwal et al., 2012). As you can see, despite the fact that somebody who is