Abstract

  Nutrition is an all-time important element of health for everyone, more so in-patients. Owing to rapid increase in the number of in-patients, partly due to increased caseload and increased hospital stay, maintaining their positive nutritional status is becoming a challenge. Apart from compromised health status, in-patients are potentially most vulnerable to malnutrition. The study aimed to determine prevalence of malnutrition in adult in-patients in medical wards at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia. Specific objectives involved determining nutritional status of adult in-patients at admission in the medical ward and food quality given to in-patients, establish nutritional status of adults in patients after two weeks and any kind of deliberate health service given to malnourished adults.
A prospective cohort study was carried out involving 161 adult in-patients comprising 81 males and 80 females. Anthropometric data constituting Mid-Upper-Arm Circumference (MUAC) was collected to determine initial nutritional status of in-patients on admission and again two week later for those that were still in the facility in addition to waist circumference. Data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22.0. The study revealed significant proportion of in-patients (39.1%) were malnourished on admission with more males being malnourished (21.7%) than females (17.4%) (P value = 0.001, CI = 0.721-0.861). Numbers of both male and female malnourished in-patients after two weeks significantly increased, 39.1% males and 30.4% females respectively. These findings can be attributed to poor food consumption patterns experienced. Respondent waist circumference indicated 3.07% females and 6.21% males were at risk of developing central obesity (P value = 0.001, CI = 0.280-0.515). Clearly there was no set protocol by the hospital staff to address in-patients’ nutritional needs.

Keywords: Malnutrition; Adult In-Patients; Anthropometric Measurements

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Citation

Citation: Nthani D.,et al. "Establishing Malnutrition Prevalence in Adult In-Patients in Female and Male Medical Wards at University Teaching Hospital: A Case Study of Lusaka Province".Acta Scientific Nutritional Health 4.1 (2020): 47-55.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Nthani D.,et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.