HOSPITAL NUTRITIONAL CARE: PROPOSITIONS ENDORSED BY THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY.

<bold>Background/objectives: </bold>the incidence of hospital undernutrition and its consequences for both the patient and the hospital has demanded procedures that ensure the delivery of good-quality hospital nutritional care. On the basis of literature reports, this study aimed to build a hospital nutritional care propositions that the scientific community later evaluated and endorsed.<bold>Methods: </bold>forty-one propositions concerning patient clinical nutritional care and hospital food service management by the Hospital Nutrition and Food Service were designed. One hundred professionals, researchers, and professors evaluated the propositions. Agreement with the propositions was analyzed by means of a five-point Likert scale (I strongly disagree; I partially disagree; I have no opinion; I partially agree; I totally agree) associated with each proposition. Agreement was considered to occur when 70% or more of the interviewees agreed (partially or totally) with the proposition. The procedure Proc Corresp of the software SAS 10, version 8, aided descriptive statistics and correspondence analysis.<bold>Results: </bold>more than 90% of the interviewees completely or partially agreed with 85% (35) of the 41 propositions; between 80 and 90% of the interviewees totally or partially agreed with 15% (6) of the 41 propositions. All the proposed criteria had over 70% agreement (total and partial). The lowest value of total agreement was 70%, attributed to the proposition that suggested patient's participation in nutritional intervention.<bold>Conclusions: </bold>the scientific community presented high level of agreement with the hospital nutritional care propositions, which suggested an important consensus about it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]