Malnutrition status in patients upon admission can lead to many serious complications such as delayed wound healing, impaired immunity, increased treatment costs, prolonged hospital stays, and even increased mortality rates. Therefore, performing nutritional risk screening immediately upon admission and throughout the treatment process becomes an urgent technical procedure.

Purpose and importance

Nutritional risk screening is the process of using standardized methods to quickly identify patients at risk of or currently suffering from malnutrition. The core purpose of this procedure is:

• Early detection of malnutrition risk: Timely identification of subjects requiring intensive nutritional intervention.
• Support enhanced recovery: Reduce complication rates such as infection, delayed wound healing, and shorten hospital stay.
• Personalize nutritional plans: Screening results are the basis for planning appropriate nutritional interventions for each patient (including oral supplementation, tube feeding, or parenteral nutrition).
• Optimize hospital management: Help allocate medical resources more effectively, especially at large medical examination and treatment facilities.

Screening tools are often based on basic indicators such as weight, body mass index (BMI), degree of unintentional weight loss, current eating status, and severity of pathology (especially metabolism-related diseases).

Implementation procedure

The procedure applies to all patients coming for examination and treatment (except for emergency cases). Medical staff will perform the following steps:

• Reception: Measure height, weight, and calculate BMI for the patient.
• Perform screening: Use the NRS 2002 tool for inpatients, MUST for outpatients, and STRONG-kids for pediatrics.
• Assessment: Determine whether the patient is at risk of malnutrition or not.

According to the NRS-2002 tool, if the total score is 3 or higher, the patient is determined to be at risk and needs nutritional intervention. This is a simple technique but brings great value in ensuring treatment effectiveness.

Note: This article is based on professional documents of the Ministry of Health and may be updated according to the latest versions.

Dr. Truong Hong Son – Director of the Center for Support & Continuing Education