An interventional study to ensure timeliness of nutritional assessment among spinal cord injured patients at tertiary care hospital in India

In order to ensure compliance to nutritional screening & its documentation as nutritional assessment form within 24 hours of patient’s admission, a prospective, longitudinal study was conducted wherein medical records of patients completing 24 hours of inpatient stay were audited and compliance rate was calculated. The study was conducted in two phases (Pre & post intervention). During pre intervention phase, existing methodology of conducting nutritional screening was studied i.e. nutritional screening was done by dietitians and documented in patient’s medical records, followed by receiving from assigned nursing staff for the concerned patient. Intervention was introduced in which, in addition to earlier method of nutritional assessment the documents were kept in the box file available at nursing station by the dietitians, instead of filing them in the patient’s medical record and two way receiving was taken (nursing and dietitian both took receiving from each other). In this method the nursing staff were asked to file the nutritional assessment document in patient’s file instead of dietitian. During the pre intervention phase and post intervention phase the compliance rate of filling the form was 75% and 96% respectively. Paired t-test was done and its value rested at 0.03 (p=0.05) and suggested that intervention was highly effective in rendering results during post intervention period.