Fighting frailty with food: early screening for malnutrition in hospitals
If you’re over 65 and you’re in the hospital for more than two days, there is a 45 per cent chance you’re malnourished. In other words, you might not be getting enough of the calories or nutrients you need to recover from your illness or injury. As a result, you might have to stay longer in hospital and your health might take a downturn during and after your stay.
Dr. Keller has been developing and testing an in-hospital nutrition intervention called More-2-Eat for the past six years. Funding from the Canadian Frailty Network (CFN) has allowed her to create and validate a simple assessment tool that frontline hospital staff can use to identify malnourished patients, and an easy and effective way to improve their nutrition status. Now, with a CFN Knowledge Translation Grant, she and her collaborators are scaling up the intervention and testing its impact on patient outcomes in ten Canadian hospitals.