NUTRITION SUPPORT TEAM: ROLE, SETTING UP AND FUTURE PLANS

Background: Malnutrition is common in hospitalized patients specially in Intensive Care Unit. Despite major advances in the quality of care, the prevalence of malnutrition in hospitalized patients has not decreased in recent years. Inappropriate nutritional support is one of the main causes of this issue that it can be caused by lack of attention to all aspects of nutrition therapy. Creating a nutritional support team (NST) is a good way to reduce malnutrition. The main purpose of NSTs should be to provide good nutrition to all patients, especially in case of need for enteral or parenteral nutrition. The purpose of this review was to critically explain about role, setting up and future plans of nutrition support teamMethods: A review of studies identified from the Cochrane Library, Complete MEDLINE, CINAHL, Complete Nursing Collection, Complete Biomedical Collection, and EMBASE, published in any language.Result and Discussion: Enteral and parenteral nutrition should be standardized to ensure the quality and to reduce complications, and it should be performed in consultation with a specialized nutrition support team whenever possible. Because increasing effectiveness and efficiency in the implementation of nutrition therapy, Interdisciplinary nutrition support teams should be established in all hospitals. The main roles of the NST are implement patient screening for nutritional risk, identify patients who require nutritional support, ensure provision of effective nutritional management for patients, identification, management, monitor and evaluate of nutritional problems. All people who need nutrition support have to receive coordinated care from a multidisciplinary team, which the combination of this team may differ according to setting and local arrangements. The multidisciplinary nutrition support team include: physician, dietitians, a specialist nutrition support nurse and pharmacist. Future plan of NST can be implementation of NSTs in any hospitals to improve nutritional management of patient,education and training of hospital staff and audit of practice, raise the funds needed to support NSTs from the health care system and further research is needed to evaluate the effects of NSTs including cost effectiveness in different settings in prevention and management of nutritional disorders.

کلیدواژه ها:

nutrition support team ، total parenteral nutrition ، Enteral nutrition ، multidisciplinary TPN teams ، intensive care unit