Screening for nutritional risk

Nutritional screening can be defined as the routine use of nutritional assessment to highlight patients at risk of nutition-related complications.The screening process should be initiated early in a hospital stay to identify at-risk patients and to target nutritional intervention towards those likely to benefit from it.Although the implementation of screening does have some cost implications it can be achieved with minimal effort by existing staff using data easily collected and recorded as part of a routine assessment (Nagel, 1993).