PP278 - IMPLEMENTING REGULAR NUTRITION RE-SCREENING AT HOSPITAL DISCHARGE- IS IT FEASIBLE?: A COLLABORATION BETWEEN HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS.

PP278

IMPLEMENTING REGULAR NUTRITION RE-SCREENING AT HOSPITAL DISCHARGE- IS IT FEASIBLE?: A COLLABORATION BETWEEN HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS.

Y. C. Ng^1,*, K. W. Wong², P. S. Ng², S. L. Tan³, V. G. Shelat⁴, D. Ng¹

¹Gastroenterology and Hepatology, ²Nutrition and Dietetics, ³Nursing Service, ⁴General Surgery, Tan Tock Seng Hospital Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Rationale: Malnutrition is prevalent in hospitalised patients and nutritional status often declines during their stay. Hence nutrition screening is recommended to be performed at admission, weekly and at discharge. In Singapore, nutrition screening is performed routinely at admission but not at discharge. We aim to introduce and measure the compliance in completing nutrition re-screening at discharge.

Methods: We implemented regular nutrition screening in 3 acute care wards (General Medicine, Geriatric Medicine, General Surgery) in Tan Tock Seng Hospital using the TTSH Nutritional Screening Tool (TTSH-NST) for 2 months. We excluded patients under palliative care or critically ill and not for resuscitation. Nutrition re-screening was done weekly by a dietitian technician, and at discharge by ward nurses. Patients who failed nutrition screening (TTSH-NST ≥4) will be referred to the ward dietitian for assessment. All ward nurses received nutrition education and briefing on the TTSH-NST before the study.

Results: We recruited 580 patients. The average length of stay was 7.9 days. All patients were weighed on admission and 12.9% were underweight. Compliance to nutrition screening at admission was 100%, but dropped to 33% at discharge. 94.5% of patients who failed nutrition screening were referred to the dietitian. Re-screening detected additional 26 (19%) patients at risk of malnutrition. 123 patients had dietitian assessment and 87 (70.7%) were diagnosed as malnourished. The prevalence of malnutriton was 14.7%.

Conclusion: The compliance to nutrition screening was high at admission but suboptimal at discharge. We increased the detection of patients who are malnourished with regular nutrition re-screening. Strategies to improve compliance to subsequent nutrition screening should be developed.

Disclosure of Interest: None declared