Evaluación del proceso de cuidado nutricional en la consulta externa de dos hospitales del distrito metropolitano de Quito, Ecuador

Abstract

Working in food and nutrition area requires of evidence-based strategies, so the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics developed a specific Nutritional Care Process (NCP) which is a systematic model that empower to professional nutritionists in order to realize a complete nutritional assessment to make judgments in proper nutritional diagnoses and to make autonomous decisions in this process. This was a descriptive research, which looked into the outpatient nutritional assistance in two public hospitals in Quito. It includes 190 patients, distributed in proportion 2:1 between Hospital A and Hospital B. A check list was used to describe each phase of the NCP. ed by chi-square test with Fisher correction. The results show that there is variability in the nutritional assessment (p < 0.0001), in this way, hospital A apply food anamnesis and clinical assessment in greater proportion (p < 0.0001), while Hospital B gets more anthropometric data; diagnoses do not have significant statistical difference (p = 0.31), BMI is used as the only tool and basis for treatment: in the nutritional intervention, the Hospital A has a higher record of nutritional goals (95.2 %) compared to Hospital B (69.8 %) (p < 0.001). In conclusion, both researched institutions have variability in the use and documentation of the NCP components.