‘NutritionDay worldwide’ is a large-scaleinternational project, with its coordinating centre in Austria,designed to reduce disease related malnutrition. The aim of the project is to increase awareness and knowledge regarding disease related malnutrition in hospitalised patients and the elderly.
The nutritionDay is a one-day cross-sectional audit with outcome evaluation, aiming to improve knowledge and awareness of malnutrition by using a simple screening test for nutritional risk. The audit aims to provide a comparative assessment of malnutrition in european hospitals , the assessment of the organisation of nutritional care in daily practice and their changes in time.The questionnaires, which are filled out by the patients, are available in almost every European language and could become a standard assessment tool and allow benchmarking with comparable institutions at a European level. The collected data is anonymously analysed and the results of each ward are made available to the staff.
The first audit took place in January 2006 and in the first two years about 1 000 units with more than 30 000 patients participated in 25 European countries.The nutritionDay is in line with the resolution on food and nutritional care in hospitals by the Council of Europe, which first underlined the problem in 2003.
