1199SEIU Dietitians Pave the Way Towards the Future
 In typical 1199SEIU fashion of anticipating and preparing for pending changes in the healthcare industry, the union’s Dietitians Education Committee planned their spring continuing education seminar to deal with a shift in the way Dietitians will be documenting their nutritional care plans in the future. The Dietitians Education Committee is comprised of both active and retired dietitians as well as a Lehman College professor.
The days of writing the old SOAP (subjective, objective assessment and plan) note will soon be gone. The new documentation model standardizes the language for nutrition assessment, and intervention under the title of the Nutrition Care Process and elevates the profession into a more evidenced-based practice. This new Nutrition Care Process model was adopted by the American Dietetic Association in 2003 and is slowly making its way into our institutions. It is modeled after the nursing care plan model developed by the American Nursing Diagnosis Association. The purpose of this new model of nutrition documentation is to standardize descriptions of nutritional assessments, interventions, and outcomes in a way that can be measured and understood by other dietitians as well as other medical professionals on the inter-disciplinary care teams. The overall goal of creating a nutrition diagnosis and care plan is to provide needed information for ongoing nutrition-based research and to prove that nutrition therapy improves health and saves money and lives, facts which will become increasingly more important to our health care institutions as they all compete for the shrinking health care dollar. Another goal of the shift to the new nutrition care model is to be able to empirically prove that nutrition interventions are safe and effective in alleviating a variety of nutritional problems related to different medical diagnoses. This would pave the way for RD services to someday be reimbursable through third-party insurance companies and government programs like Medicaid and Medicare. For the institutions, there is also the added benefit of proving that this new nutrition care model will be cost-effective, thereby saving the hospitals needed revenue to provide ongoing services to the communities they service.  | | Jacobi Hospital Dietitians, from left, Mohammad Giashuddin, RD, Lynda Tyson, Clinical Dietitian, and Melanie Castillo, RD, CNSD |
Simply stated, the new nutrition care model consists of several steps including nutrition assessment, nutrition diagnosis, nutrition intervention, and nutrition monitoring and evaluation, and allows all dietitians to speak the same language. The nutrition diagnosis component comprises what has become known as a PESS statement – a nutrition problem, etiology, signs, and symptoms. By standardizing the language, the focus becomes more clinically-based on empirical facts rather than subjective and descriptive anecdotes. It allows the dietitian to develop a plan that alleviates the observable symptoms and prioritize the needed nutritional interventions.On March 9th, in celebration of National Nutrition Month, over 143 dietitians and dietetic students/interns gave up their Sunday off and crammed into the 1199SEIU auditorium to hear Dr. Beatriz Dykes, a consultant from Dykes and Associates, Inc. lecture about the new nutrition care process model. Dr. Dykes specializes in Nutrition Education, Food Systems, and Dietetics Management and had the participants riveted to their chairs with her presentation. Dr. Dykes is also an Adjunct Professor at both Lehman and Hunter Colleges in their respective Nutrition Programs. Time was allotted in the afternoon session to practice learning the new way of nutritional thinking and documenting with several important questions raised by the audience. A luncheon sponsored by 1199SEIU in honor of the dietitians heard a presentation on Obesity and Body Composition by Dr. Khursheed Navder, Associate Professor and Didactic Program Director from the Nutrition and Food Science in Urban Public Health Program at Hunter College. Dr. Navder’s address was interactive and very informative. Many participants were intrigued by the evidence presented about how body composition and early cellular structure for obesity can be pre-determined by, among other factors, the pre-natal environment . For more information on the Nutrition Care Process, please refer either to the American Dietetic Association’s website, or see the January 2007 article in Today’s Dietitian. If interested in joining the Dietitians Education Committee please call or e-mail Cynthia Wolff, Professional & Technical Specialist at (212) 261-2368 or Cynthiaw@1199.org.
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