Objective. An important domain of a comprehensive geriatric assessment, in addition to the usual domains, is the assessment of nutritional status. The aim of this paper is to present the development of a new instrument/tool for the assessment of nutritional risk in the elderly. Methods. An international team of experts constructed and validated a new instrument/tool for nutritional risk assessment in older adults in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Nutrition risk assessment in older adults in primary care - NRA). Results. The nutritional risk screening and assessment tool is comprehensive, has acceptable validity and internal consistency, and contains a total of 14 questions. The scoring of each question as well as the final score of the tool is designed in detail, and the maximum number of points is 21. The tool has three categories, and a lower score indicates a nutritional risk. An eight-step approach was used to determine the most appropriate items for nutritional risk screening and malnutrition assessment: correspondence analysis, summary item generation, content validity, internal consistency, construct validity, criterion validity, face validity, and reliability. A kappa coefficient of 0.918 (p0.001) indicates excellent intra-rater reliability. The Alpha coefficient (0.721) was significant. The time required to complete the assessment ranged from 15 to 22 minutes. Conclusion. Application of this new tool is desirable and feasible in other countries with linguistic validation, and the new NRA tool is available in Serbian and English.
Pavlović et al. (Wed,) studied this question.