NUTCAP works as a clinical placement for nursing students undertaking the BSc Hons Nursing degree. Within an identified health or social care setting, nursing students attend a 10-13-week supernumerary placement. Throughout the course of the project, the nursing students attend weekly meetings with their assigned project leaders who acts as practice assessor/supervisor, as they work alongside staff to identify the barriers and supports for nutritional care, complete audits in their allocated clinical areas to identify the nutritional issues, recognise good practice, and identify cost effective interventions yo address concerns that are raised.
- The project uses a participatory action research methodology to understand and explore the nutritional issues within a specific sector or population group.
- Students undertake training on nutritional screening, and clinical audits.
- Students complete scoping literature reviews and critically appraise the evidence
The audit tool is based on the The Canadian Malnutrition Task Force More-2-eat validated tool developed for a national survey to understand current practices around malnutrition in Canadian hospitals. The tool captures Age, the reason for admission weight, BMI, MUST screening tool completion, food and fluid charts Using the Mealtime Audit Tool (MAT) (CMTF 2015), non-participant observations of the general wards were recorded to monitor meal times. Patient documentation was further reviewed and the data was collected between November 2021 and July 2022.
