Developing Nutritional Services in Large Multi-office Home Health Agency

Abstract

LEARNING OUTCOME: To explore the development of a nutrition intervention program for a Home Health Care agency.The purpose of this project was to develop nutritional screening and intervention in a multi office Home Health Care agency. This agency, an affiliate of North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo, MS, serves 3,500 patients in 13 counties from 11 different offices (1994 figures).This agency's professional staff consists of 240 total Registered Nurses and eight nurse clinicians.As a result of a 1994 staff survey, a need was identified for the services of a Registered Dietitian.The project was developed using the Performance Improvement concepts of Benchmark, Deliver, Evaluate and Improve. Some of the steps taken included: survey of nurses, development of screening and assessment tools, inservice training of Home Care staff, establishment of interdisciplinary nutrition team meetings, collection of nutritional outcomes, follow-up meetings with Teamworks, the Home Care Performance Improvement Team and developing communication and charting tools for this multi disciplinary team to use.As a result of this project, all NMMC Home Care patients are now screened for nutritional risk and those identified at risk are assessed by RD and an interdisciplinary nutrition care team. Recommendations are given to staff RN for implementation.Other nutritional services developed include: staff diet inservices, development of diet education materials and writing articles for Home Care Newsletter. Another result of the project was that the NMMC Home Care Agency realized the benefits of the RD as a team member. Budgeted consultant hours were increased from eight hours per week to 24 hours per week.