Find in Library

Introduction: Malnutrition has been reported to be amongst the leading causes of increased morbidity in patients with Spinal Cord Injury. Objective: A multi center survey was done with the objectives of finding awareness of nutrition parameters, related care plans and to test knowledge of nutrition among doctors/nurses working in tertiary care hospitals. Design: A 16 item questionnaire was prepared and sent to health professionals in the department of Orthopedics, PMR, Neurosurgery and Anesthesia over a period of two months. Each question had randomly arranged five responses of which one was the correct option. Completely filled questionnaires were included in the analysis. Results and Conclusion: This study demonstrated that awareness of need for nutrition screening is poor with a majority of participants failing to acknowledge existence of such parameters. It also highlighted other lacunas in knowledge pertaining to calorie content of intravenous fluids, indicators of malnutrition and choice of nutritional support in malnourished patients. Surprisingly, more than half of the participants reported a high perceived cut-off point for malnourishment implying that a large proportion of such patients go undetected and unmanaged, thus highlighting the need for further awareness in implementation of nutrition therapy.