Canadian Malnutrition Awareness Week, our annual campaign, aims to enhance learning of clinicians, healthcare providers and consumers around malnutrition. CMAW 2024 dates to follow.
In primary care, 1 dollar spent on nutrition interventions can save up to 99 dollars by reducing medication use, hospitalizations and freeing up physician time.
We had Dr. Keller come and present at grand rounds in June and have since developed a Malnutrition Task Force cochaired by myself and my nurse educator. All of our nursing directors are part of this team as well!! We just implemented "awareness initiatives" with our nursing staff with two Friday Information Sharing Tidbits (Oct 24/31) and have developed, along with our volunteer coordinator a Meal Buddies program where volunteers work on acute care wards for all three meals to open containers and prep food etc. We also are working with our medical records director to have physicians start coding for malnutrition in their charting. Physician education for this will begin soon. All of this has started since our first meeting in July following a round table discussion with our nursing directors and VP along with Dr. Keller after her presentation in June. I didn't mention that the organizer for grand rounds commended us for having brought together the most attendees for a grand rounds presentation!! Anyway, I would be interested in any further info that can assist us with making malnutrition awareness a culture at our hospital. We have a brand new (just three years old) state of the art facility and it is so exciting that we have senior admin behind us in this initiative...just got through presenting at Quality Council on our Malnutrition Task Force and the reason for its development!! Now hoping that the value of nutrition care will be more widely recognized (can’t wait for the cost data to be published) so that we can acquire more RD time for our hospital.
