What is Individualized Nutritional Care?
An opportunity to improve outcomes by focusing on what matters to patients
Individualized nutritional care (INC) is nutritional care that is tailored to a patient’s specific needs, preferences and goals. It is a way of delivering nutritional care that is patient centered and contributes to quality in health care1-3.
A recent publication by Holdoway et al. has focused on defining INC, identifying the existing evidence supporting this concept, and how it can be delivered in nutritional practice4. The publication has proposed four key pillars of INC: what matters to patients, shared decision making, evidence informed multimodal nutritional care and monitoring outcomes4.
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Individualized Nutritional Care for Disease Related Malnutrition: Improving Outcomes by Focusing on What Matters to Patients
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Why Provide Individualized Nutritional Care?
By engaging with patient to understand their needs, preferences and goals, healthcare professionals can identify the optimal nutritional intervention for each patient. Doing so can lead to better adherence to nutritional therapy, and ultimately, improved patient outcomes4.
How can Healthcare Professionals Deliver Individualized Nutritional Care?
The Nutrition Care Process (NCP) is a systematic process used by healthcare professionals, predominantly dietitians, to deliver nutritional care. First adopted by the Academic of Nutrition & Dietetics in the United States, the NCP has been widely adopted or adapted internationally5-8. Although the NCP is predominantly used by dietitians, the principles of the NCP can be used by non-nutrition experts or by nutrition experts for training non-nutrition experts4.
What Evidence is there to Support Individualized Nutritional Care?
There have been an increasing number of studies reporting aspects of individualization to nutritional interventions over the past twenty years. In addition, between 2017-2022, seventeen nutrition guidelines from different internationally recognized professional organizations that focused on the prevention and management of disease-related malnutrition included elements of INC in their recommendations4.
Nutricia is Committed to Helping Healthcare Professionals Deliver Individualized Nutritional Care
Nutricia is committed to supporting an individualized approach to nutritional care. We are dedicated to creating innovations that can meet patient needs, preferences and goals, and investing in evidence that demonstrates the role of medical nutrition in individualized nutritional care. Our diverse, extensive, adult oral nutritional supplements and tube portfolios can help address your patient’s needs, preferences, and goals.
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