The case for nutritional support. Eliminating hospital-acquired malnutrition improves outcomes and reduces costs.

Taking steps to eliminate hospital-acquired malnutrition in patients with disease or trauma significantly improves treatment outcomes. Patients' ability to recover from trauma or illness and respond to therapy depends on how well they synthesize proteins necessary to regain homeostasis. It is possible for patients to die from complications of progressive hospital-acquired malnutrition. Hospital executives and clinical personnel must understand that timely intervention with nonvolitional feeding in appropriately selected patients will decrease morbidity and length of stay. Hospitals that ignore nutritional support therapy for patients may be in violation of quality-of-care standards. And hospitals that do not have hyperalimentation or nutritional support teams, or that have disbanded such teams for economic reasons, are putting their critically ill patients at risk for malnutrition.