Malnutrition Screening on Admission: Why a Two-Minute Tool Keeps Being Skipped
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22275615Keywords:
Malnutrition screening, NRS-2002, MUST, Hospital malnutrition, ImplementationAbstract
Nutrition screening on admission takes about two minutes and is recommended within twenty-four hours by every major guideline,
yet audit repeatedly finds it incomplete. In one admission audit of 197 patients, 39 per cent had a primary screening recorded and
21 per cent were screened within twenty-four hours; a survey of 1,777 practitioners found 36.7 per cent completing screening at
admission, 50.8 per cent within twenty-four hours and 69 per cent documenting the result. The premise of the title is only partly
right, and two findings complicate it. Screening is not uniformly skipped: one Australian series screened 207 of 208 patients on
admission while only a third were rescreened weekly. And where screening is completed, action frequently does not follow, with
27.1 per cent of patients identified at risk receiving nutritional support in one point prevalence study. The instruments also
disagree sharply, identifying between 23.8 and 85.7 per cent of the same 420 patients as at risk.
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