Starting a nutrition support team: short-term pain for long-term gain.

This article relates the collective wisdom of five nutrition support professionals who share their experience in starting a nutrition support team. These professionals describe how to navigate the administrative--and political--waters, which are often murky and filled with obstacles. In addition, a hospital administrator discloses what CEO types look for when clinicians propose starting up a nutrition support team in their institutions. The upshot: In this rapidly changing environment, nutrition support professionals would do well to hone their political skills and use them to persuade their administrators that nutrition support is indeed a cost-effective therapy that benefits patients--and that it is best delivered in an interdisciplinary approach.