A survey of the Nutrition Care Process in Japanese acute care hospitals using a nationwide web-based questionnaire.

Background and objectives: Study aim was to determine the levels and barriers of the Nutrition Care Process (NCP), a practical method of individualized nutrition support.

Methods and study design: Delegate of registered dietitians (RDs) from acute-care hospitals answered our nationwide web-based questionnaire (April-June, 2023) to determine the implementation status of screening, assessment, intervention (including planning), and monitoring (components of the NCP).

Results: Of 5,378 institutions contacted, 905 (16.8%) responded. For Screening, 80.0% screened all inpatients: primary personnel in charge were RDs (57.6%); the most used screening tool was Subjective Global Assessment (SGA) (49.2%). For Assessment, 66.1% assessed all inpatients: food intake (93.3%) was most evaluated whereas muscle mass and strength (13.0%, 8.8%) were least evaluated. For Intervention, 43.9% did so within 48h of hospital admission: oral nutritional supplement (92.9%) was the most common RDs intervention and parenteral nutrition (29.9%) was used less. For Monitoring, 18.5% of institutions had monitoring frequency of ≥ 3 times/week whilst 23.0% had monitoring less than once a week for severely malnourished patients. Energy and protein intake (93.7%, 84.3%) were most monitored and lipid intake (30.1%) was less monitored.

Conclusions: Barriers of NCP included inefficient staffing systems and unsuitable tools in Screening, inaccurate patient targeting and lack of important evaluation items in Assessment, delayed timing and incomplete contents in Intervention, and inadequate fre-quency and lack of important evaluation items in Monitoring. An increase in RDs staffing in acute-care general wards, widespread NCP instruction manuals, and education about the tools and evaluation items utilized in nutritional management are possible solutions.