Acute Care Theory

Nutrition is a very important and essential part in everyone’s everyday life. However, when it comes to acute care hospitals, long-term acute care in particular, proper intake of food and water can be highly needed in order for a patient to become healthy and be able to return to his or her everyday life outside of the acute care hospital facility. Obesity became a big problem for many developed nations, however malnutrition reported in hospital patients still remains a prevalent issue, that has to be solved in order to improve the quality of acute care and nutritional care in particular (WHO, 2010). According to Florence Nightingale’s theory, nutritional care is one of the major factors that plays an important role in healing of the patients.
Even though hospitals ignore the importance of nutritional care, nutritional care in acute care hospitals should be improved because malnutrition of the patients can increase the time of recovery and healing according to the Nightingale’s theory which is the basis of enhancing nutrition and hydration.
According to the research, malnutrition affects 20 to 50 percent of the patients (Agarwal, Ferguson, Banks, Bauer, Capra, & Isenring, 2012). This is a problem which most of the time goes unrecognized by the hospitals and other acute care facilities. However untreated malnutrition is associated with number of negative consequences such as delayed wound healing, increased infection rates, functional decline, increased length of stay in the hospital and increased mortality (Shepherd, 2011). Dieticians from 56 hospitals in New Zeeland and Australia performed a research on this subject by performing screening of the patients for malnutrition using Malnutrition Screening tool (Agarwal et al., 2012). Dieticians recorded patients’ dietary intake at each time of the day they had a main meal and snacks (Agarwal et al., 2012). From 3122 participants in this experiment, forty-one percent were at risk of malnutrition and overall malnutrition prevalence was at thirty-two percent (Agarwal et al., 2012). Fifty-five percent of malnourished patients and thirty-five percent of well-nourished patients were consuming less than half of the food offered, stating that they were not hungry (Agarwal et al., 2012). As you can see, despite the fact that somebody who is
unwell should a have a proper food intake at the right periods of time in order to feel well and be healthy again, there are still a number of concerns about nutrition in health and social sectors. Nutritional screening, that was performed in the research, is the only way that malnourished patients or patients at the risk of malnourishment can be diagnosed (RCN, 2010). There are different reasons why people may be malnourished (RCN, 2010). Some of them include apathy, depression, low income, physical problems with swallowing and chewing, inability to feed themselves, and forgetting to eat (RCN, 2010). However, it was noticed that good nutrition at the proper timing and good hydration help people to achieve healthy lifestyle and well-being (RCN, 2010). The plan was made in order to achieve this goal by County Durham and Darlington PTC. Their plan consisted of several major points like asking patients about the food quality and providing them with the food of specific requirements, such as food that is safe for people with diabetes (RCN, 2010). In addition to that the main point of this plan was for older people to understand that proper nutrition is very important for them, to be aware of their weight and to understand that hospital staff has a particular interest in making sure that they provide their patients with everything it takes to make sure there is no risk of malnourishment (RCN, 2010).