Elderly still hungry to be heard: a nutrition update from Age UK

Abstract

With a shocking 180,000 patients leaving hospital malnourished each year (O’Brien, 2011) and 239 dying of malnutrition during their stay in 2009 (Nutrition Action Plan Delivery Board, 2009), Age UK’s work to tackle malnutrition in hospitals has never been more important. At a cost to the NHS of £7.3 billion per year (Age UK, 2010), older patients are either admitted to hospital malnourished and nothing is done about it, or become malnourished because they don’t get the right food or the help needed to eat it. Age UK created its ‘Hungry to be Heard’ campaign in 2006 to tackle this most serious and avoidable issue and to offer practical ways to help stop people in later life becoming malnourished while in hospital. At its inception, the campaign outlined seven key steps that hospitals urgently need to implement to help eradicate malnutrition in hospitals. Four years on from the launch of Hungry to be Heard, positive moves have been made and there are some excellent examples of the steps making a huge difference to how hospitals monitor, treat and prevent malnutrition in hospitals. However, as Age UK’s (2011) report Still Hungry to be Heard highlights, a lot more needs to be done. For example, guidelines state that hospitals are supposed to screen people in later life for malnutrition on arrival and during their stay, but currently, there is inconsistency from hospital to hospital and between wards. Some patients are screened inaccurately; others are screened accurately but no action is taken, and some are not screened at all.