Welcome to the Enteral Nutrition section! Throughout this section, an inpatient case study will be used to enhance your learning and comprehension of enteral nutrition. You will learn what information to gather for your assessment, how to interpret that data to form a nutrition care plan, how to implement your patient’s care plan, and what to look for when following-up and evaluating your plan. As you progress through the content, please keep in mind that the nutrition care process model used here is dynamic and not a linear, step-by-step process. The case study used here is an example, and not all cases will follow the same path.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the section you will be able to:

1. Identify indications, contradictions, and routes of support to determine the requirement for enteral nutrition.
2. Identify the routes, sites of delivery, and delivery methods of enteral nutrition.
3. Identify how to gather clinical, anthropometric, biochemical, and dietary data necessary to complete an enteral nutrition assessment.
4. Determine a patients energy, protein, and fluid needs using data from the initial assessment.
5. Interpret biochemical values, including sodium, potassium, phosphorous, calcium, magnesium, albumin, BUN/urea, and creatinine.
6. Understand the role of the speech language pathologist and importance of their assessment for a patient with dysphagia.
7. Understand and identify refeeding syndrome risk for a patient and the management and evaluation procedures associated with preventing it.
8. Choose an appropriate enteral nutrition formula and plan for a patient.
9. Identify the complications of enteral nutrition and the appropriate management and monitoring procedures.
10. Understand the roles of the members of the interdisciplinary team, including the speech language
    pathologist, medical doctor, nurse practitioner, pharmacist, registered nurse, physiotherapist, occupational therapist and social worker.
11. Evaluate the nutrition care plan using assessment data relevant to the patient nutrition concerns, including malnutrition, symptom management, enteral nutrition changes, medications, supplements, and medical plan.