Nutritional status shapes wound healing, immune function, strength, and recovery, and undernutrition is common and frequently missed in home-health patients. A therapeutic diet that is prescribed but not understood or not followed, a slow unintentional weight loss, or declining intake during illness all signal risk that requires nursing judgment to detect and act on before it drives decline or rehospitalization.
The purpose of this module is to give clinicians the skilled framework and chartable language that demonstrate nutritional assessment, therapeutic-diet management, malnutrition screening, and enteral-nutrition management were reasonable and necessary and required the skills of a licensed nurse. It is the primary home for nutritional assessment; weight is shared with Vital Signs, swallowing with Taste / Swallowing, and disease-specific diet parameters are cross-linked, not duplicated, into the Disease overlays.
