Guidelines will help malnourished patients

Doctors and nurses in the UK have been issued with new guidelines to help them identify patients who may be malnourished.

The guidelines are an attempt to eradicate a problem which apparently costs the National Health Service millions every year.

In future all hospital in-patients and all out-patients attending their first clinic appointments will be weighed and measured to ensure they are not malnourished or in danger of becoming so.

It seems patients who are under nourished require more time in hospital and need more intensive caring.

According to Andrea Sutcliffe, deputy chief executive of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), the guidelines should help reassure patients and give confidence to their relatives and carers, that all at risk patients, no matter where they live or what their underlying condition, will now be screened and if necessary offered appropriate nutritional support.

Sutcliffe says some of the recommendations would add cost in the short-term, but would produce long-term savings because health service resources will ultimately be used more effectively if the problem is detected early on.

Dr Mike Stroud of the Institute of Human Nutrition at Southampton University agrees that malnutrition is a major problem within the NHS and says the guidelines contains one obvious and simple message 'do not let the patient starve and when you offer them nutrition support, do so by the safest, simplest, most effective route'.

It seems that while malnutrition within the general population is estimated at less than 5 percent, among hospital in-patients and those in care homes as many as 40 percent many be suffering from poor nutrition.

Those figures escalate for those over 65 with as many as 60 percent of elderly hospital patients possibly malnourished.