Malnutrition is highly prevalent in hospitals, aged-care facilities, and community settings. It leads to poor health outcomes, increases a person’s length of stay in hospital and impacts one’s quality of life. In this Podcast, Maree Ferguson, Dietitian Connection Founder and Director interviews Associate Professor Judy Bauer to investigate the role dietitians can play in disease-related malnutrition. We explore what is currently being done and how we can move forward in our future practice.
About the speakers:
Associate Professor Judy Bauer is extremely dedicated to the dietetics profession and is the Translational Research Leader for the Dietitians Association of Australia. Judy was previously the Director of the Centre for Dietetics Research at the University of Queensland. Judy has served two terms as a Director of the Dietitians Association of Australia, Associate Editor and Supplement Editor of Nutrition & Dietetics. Judy’s research interests include evidence-based practice, translational research, nutrition intervention for malnutrition, cancer and chronic kidney disease. One of Judy’s research areas has included the development and validation of nutrition screening and assessment tools.
This episode is supported by  
In this episode, we discuss:
- Judy’s background and why she is so passionate about preventing and treating malnutrition
- The current statistics for malnutrition, are they getting better in hospital, aged care, and community settings?
- The difference between screening versus assessment, and ‘at-risk of’ versus actual diagnosed malnutrition
- How can dietitians advocate better at patient level for managing malnutrition?
- Tips for driving change, how we can use the right language with stakeholders to drive change
- How can we improve advocacy at an organisational level for malnutrition and what are the best practice initiatives for moving forward?
- How reporting hospital-acquired malnutrition is a requirement in the new Australian hospital standards, how we can use this as an opportunity versus seeing it as a threat?
- How nutrition support can be used more proactively in treating disease-related malnutrition (DRM)
- We discuss examples of effective existing interventions for DRM
- Judy’s thoughts on resources and budget constraints for treating DRM and how to manage this
Click HERE for the CPD quiz
*CPD hours are applicable for Australian and New Zealand dietitians. Check your local country requirements to see if you can claim for continuing education.