Patient nutrition education follow-up in the hospital setting.

Ideally, hospital patients should have the opportunity as outpatients for continued nutritional counseling by a dietitian or nutritionist. However, when this is not feasible, alternate methods can be developed to provide some follow-up and improve nutritional care. The outpatient nutrition education questionnaire is one such tool that can be implemented and utilized to give the patient an opportunity to ask for further help, while alerting the dietitian to patients needing further assistance.