With the focus of care shifting from the hospital to the community, supportive nutritional care to old people is to become an important issue to address in the community, since undernutrition has serious consequences, both for the quality of life and for the health care costs. Several modifiable nutritional risk factors relate to undernutrition. Unfortunately, the problem with (risk of) undernutrition is aggravated due to a lack of alertness among e.g. health care staff, leading to insufficient attention for systemic screening and nutritional care. Only a few of the existing screening tools have been validated among old people receiving support at home. Few studies have assessed the beneficial effect of nutritional support among old people in their own home, and recently, it was concluded that such have shown limited effects. One reason may be that the nutritional interventions performed have not taken the multiple nutritional risk factors afore-mentioned into consideration when formulating the action/treatment plan and hence not used a multidisciplinary approach. Another reason may be that the intervention studies have not used validated screening tools to identify those old people most likely to benefit from the nutritional support. However, three recent studies have used a multidisciplinary approach and two have proven a beneficial effect on the quality of life of the old people and the health care costs. These findings suggest that when planning nutritional intervention studies for old people receiving support at home, modifiable nutritional risk factors should be taken into consideration, and a multidisciplinary approach considered.

Malnutrition is frequently undetected in care homes. It is recommended that residents are screened on admission and at suitable intervals thereafter. It is aimed to implement the ‘Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool’ (‘MUST’) in all care homes in Norfolk in order to fulfil this recommendation. Following a pilot of successful (but time-consuming) ‘MUST’ training a train-the-trainer package was developed as a practical way of achieving this goal. Courses were held in 2007, each comprising a study day and an assessment of each trainer delivering training. Trainers were provided with a dossier of training support materials. Data were collected at the study day and 3 months after the course to evaluate its effectiveness. Sixty-seven trainers were trained, all of whom rated the course as effective in preparing them to deliver training. At their assessments 96% were able to explain ‘MUST’ accurately. Of the new trainers 44% returned follow-up questionnaires and copies of sample care plans. The majority of care plans showed ‘MUST’ scores had been calculated accurately and appropriate nutrition care plans had been set up and evaluated. The train-the-trainer model is an effective method of training large numbers of care-home staff to use ‘MUST’. One of the unexpected benefits observed was the ownership taken by the trainers, which was demonstrated by the enthusiasm and confidence with which they subsequently trained their colleagues.

The introduction of the process of nutritional screening into clinical standards has been driven by the increasing awareness of the prevalence of undernutrition in acute and primary care, along with its associated morbidity and mortality. However, the increasing prevalence of obesity in the general population suggests that an increased number of patients admitted to hospital will be obese. Increased morbidity has also been reported in the injured obese patient and may be associated with poor nutritional support. This situation may occur because the profound metabolic disturbances accompanying trauma in this group are not recognised, and subsequent feeding practices are inappropriate. Screening tools currently classify patients by using simple markers of assessment at the whole-body level, such as BMI. Subsequently, patients are identified as at risk only if they are undernourished. Such comparisons would by definition classify injured obese patients as at minimal or no nutritional risk, and they would therefore be less likely to be re-screened. This approach could result in potential increases in morbidity, length of rehabilitation and consequent length of hospital stay. It is likely that the identification of potential risk in obese injured patients goes beyond the measurement of such indices as BMI and percentage weight loss, which are currently utilised by the majority of screening processes.

Protein-energy undernutrition, or the possibility of its development, has been documented to occur frequently in surgical patients admitted to hospital. Nutritional status is known to deteriorate over the course of the hospital stay, with poor awareness by medical and nursing staff as to the deleterious effects of impaired nutritional status on clinical outcome and hospital costs. While there is no consensus on the best method for assessment of the nutritional status of surgical patients pre-operatively, there are a number of techniques available. These techniques can be divided into two types, those suitable for screening for nutrition risk on admission to hospital and those used to fully assess nutritional status. Both techniques have their limitations, but if used correctly, and their limitations recognized, should identify the appropriate degree of nutritional intervention for an individual patient in a timely and cost-effective manner. The techniques currently available for nutritional screening and nutritional assessment are reviewed, and their applicability to the Irish setting are discussed in the present paper.