Understanding Nutritional Health in Older Adults: A Pilot Study

A pilot study of adults ages 65 and older admitted to an acute care setting was conducted to compare nutritional risk as measured by hospital dieticians with two Nutrition Screening Initiative tools, the DETERMINE Your Nutritional Health Checklist and the Level I Screen, and to elicit from patients their own perceptions of nutritional health. Ten community-living older adults were interviewed. Although all 10 were at nutritional risk as measured by both hospital assessment and nutritional risk screening tools, none of these patients believed themselves to be at risk. One conclusion of this pilot is that interventions and education need to be tailored to the perceptions of targeted individuals.