Search

Malnutrition in older adults is a frequent and major problem. Despite the fact that nurses have an essential role in nutritional care, they fail to ensure appropriate delivery in preventing and treating malnutrition. For improvement, it is necessary to understand the perspective of nurses about malnutrition. The aim of this study was to gain insight into nurses’ opinions and beliefs about malnutrition in older adults. A cross-sectional study was conducted where nurses working in different health care settings were asked to fill in a survey with twelve questions regarding different aspects of malnutrition. Nurses (n = 557) frequently observe malnutrition in older care recipients, and they consider this as a serious health problem. They believe that prevention and treatment of malnutrition is important and they see screening of malnutrition as a relevant nursing activity. They also consider nutritional care as multidisciplinary. Nurses state their need for education to give adequate nutritional care. Nurses’ opinions and beliefs about malnutrition in older adults is positive, which enhances nurses’ behavior to give sufficient nutritional care to older adults. To gain more benefit in improving nursing activities within nutritional care for older adults, more education is needed targeting nurse professionals and nurse students.

Nurses play an important role in the prevention and treatment of malnutrition in older adults. However, research shows that nurses lack the motivation to give adequate nutritional care. In order to change this motivation a learning intervention about nutrition in older adults targeted at nurses would be desirable. The aim of this study was to assess the development, validation, and reliability of a learning intervention about nutrition in older adults. The results show that this learning intervention has a good construct and content validity, and is psychometrically sound. Questions of the learning intervention can be presented at once or in a snack-sized way, where the questions are presented over a period of time. This learning intervention can be used for developers of similar interventions, and as part of educating programs for nursing professionals and nursing students about nutritional care for older adults.