Protected: Excerpt of Malnutrition: Improving Nutritional Status of Hospitalized Patients

We investigated the nutritional status of patients who were hospitalized and how to improve their overall nutrition during their stay. There are many things that we discovered about this topic including the fact that the patients nutritional status is a big predicting factor of their health outcomes. Longer hospital stays can be due to poor nutritional outcomes. One of the studies that we looked at stated that patients who were malnourished stayed in the hospital for an average of 5 days longer than the typical patient. Nurses know the patient the best, and may be responsible for assessing what foods the patient likes, what they would eat more of, etc.

Completing the literature did change my assumptions, because I did not think or believe that the patients nutrition effected things such as the length of their hospital stay. We had some minor things that we needed to revise and readdress when we submitted our draft proposal. After completing that, we went over the 2-page benchmark, so we had some more simple fixes before adding to this post. The overall findings will help me in my future practice, I will always try to get patients food that they enjoy and that they will eat while being in the hospital. Even if it takes talking to the family to bring in something the patient really enjoys. It is never a good sign when your patient is not eating, and part of your job is to determine barriers as to why this is occurring and how you can help.

Some successes that my team has experienced are good communication between all of us, timely completion of all our assignments and overall good teamwork. I feel like our team process is to simply work together to get the assignments done according to the guidelines that we are given. We always get right to the task that we need to accomplish. One challenge that has come up is a person being out sick from class, but we overcame this challenge by facetiming them to include them in what was going on. We always share a google document so we can all work on the assignment at the same time.