Malnutrition and pressure ulcers: nutritional assessment tools.

Good nutrition is essential throughout life and often patients have a poor understanding of what a balanced diet comprises. Nurses need to have a good comprehension of malnutrition. Where malnutrition is evident it can be resolved by working with the patient to encourage a healthy diet. One way to improve patient nutrition is by a nutrition audit of patient food. Numerous nutritional assessment tools exist which help to identify a patient's nutritional status. No nationally standardized nutritional assessment tool exists and there is a danger of assessment methods becoming as proliferate as pressure ulcer risk assessment tools. A solution to this problem may be to use a pressure ulcer risk assessment tool with a nutritional risk assessment tool such as the Burton Score. Pressure ulcers and malnutrition have been demonstrated to be strongly correlated with each other. Malnutrition is not just present in hospitals but also in nursing homes. A solution to this problem is to use nutritional tools to highlight nutritional deficiency in a patient's diet not only in hospitals but also in the community and in nursing homes.