Study links poor food intake with risk of death in hospital

Hospital patients are more likely to die within 30 days of admission if they eat less than a quarter of the food they are offered or are already malnourished.

This one of the key findings of recent research that looked at more than 3000 patients in 56 Australian and New Zealand hospitals.

Dr Ekta Agarwal, from Queensland University of Technology’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, said the study showed that poor food intake was associated with a significantly high risk of in-hospital death rates regardless of the patients’ age, nutritional status, and type and severity of disease.

Agarwal sat down with Nursing Review to unpack the findings and discuss what should be done on the back of the data.