Requirement for the structure and function of a nutritional support team

Abstract

Procedures in clinical nutrition have gained both invasiveness as well as the complexity. Thus improved education of professionals and their alliance in hospital based nutritional support teams (NST) is demanding. Two forms of collaboration, the "interdisciplinary nutritional committee" and the "department for nutritional therapy", are discussed. It is the goal of this contribution to present structure and tasks of an independently working department for nutritional support therapy. The pertinent areas of activity are composed as followed: clinical nutritional therapy, home nutrition, education, research, and quality management. The team members include the physician, the dietitian, the nurse, the nutritionist, and the pharmacist. The individual tasks as well as the areas of responsibility are presented. We discuss, whether nutritional support teams might be suitable to achieve cost reduction, provided adequate working conditions are available. Issues like "performance related reimbursement" and "NST certification" by health care organizations are discussed. We also elude to the option to merge services with other health care providers in order to built up an inter-disciplinary organization system. We conclude that nutritional support teams have to be prepared to meet hospital needs. Costs/benefit balances have to be assessable and must be documented. Although the effectiveness of selected nutritional support teams was clearly shown, it is the challenge of each individual team to produce proof of effectiveness for itself. Acceptable working conditions, however, should be provided as they have to be considered indispensable to achieve high quality performance.