Nutritional risk screening and application of nutritional support in hospitalized patients

Objective To investigate the prevalence of nutritional risk,undernutrition,and nutritional support in inpatients of a hospital.Methods Totally 868 adult patients in 5 departments(digestive medicine,urology medicine,respira tory medicine,general surgery,and thoracic surgery)were enrolled from August to Decem ber,2005 with fix-point consecutive sampling.Nutritional risk screening was conducted and nutritional support was evaluated in the patients with the adoption of Nutritional RiskS creening 2002 method.There lationship between nutritional risk and nutritional support was analyzed.Results Overall prevalence of undernutrition was 21.1% and nutritional risk was 37.9%.Among the 5 departments,digestive medicine had the highest prevalence of both undernutrition and nutritional risk(28.7%,53.0%).Among all the patients,the rate of nutritional support was 24.4%,including 37.1% of patients with nutritional risk(329 cases)and 16.7% of non-risk patients(539 cases).Conclusion Alarge proportion of inpatients were at nutritional risk or undernutrition in the hospital.The application of nutritional support is inappropriate.