Nutrition Interventions

Just the other day in our older adults course, we had a guest lecturer about the value of nutrition in individual's lives. She did a great job conveying her message on the importance of people receiving proper nutrition and ensuring that they are not malnourished. Malnourishment has been a problem for many years in the hospital setting and continues to be increasingly prevalent issue. Our guest speaker stressed the importance of educating our clients on ways to avoid malnourishment and increase well-being. The purpose of this blog post is to discuss two interventions that we as future occupational therapists can do to help our clients increase their quality of life. 

As our guest lecturer mentioned there are basically two main ways we can help someone who is not getting proper nutrition. These are exercise and eating protein. To give two main examples I want to first think about an older adult population. This would be a perfect population to have group therapy. The group therapy could offer exercise classes, and nutrition education for the members. A second client, nutrition interventions would be beneficial for is single mothers in underserved communities. Interventions for these clients could focus primarily on education. Education would include resources for the mothers, and stressing the importance for proper nutrition for their kids. Kids are constantly growing so its important to ensure that they are eating a proper diet.

Lastly, I really enjoyed this presentation. There were a lot of important takeaways we can use when we get out into the real world. In school we have not had a whole lot of information on this topic so it was nice to finally get some information about it. I look forward to applying my clinical reasoning skills to future situations.

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