Nutrition nurses are clinical nurse specialists with knowledge, expertise and experience in nutrition support.
The Nutrition Nursing team are mostly involved with patients who are unable to eat or drink normally and require special feeding tubes to receive nutrition in liquid form or a highly specialised method of feeding patients directly into their blood stream.
Nutrition nurses carry out the following tasks:
- Assess patients for a variety of special feeding tubes
- Explain to patients how tubes are inserted
- Teach and support patients to look after their own tubes if they are going home with them
- Teach ward staff how to look after patients with special tubes
- Resolve problems with tubes
- Teach ward staff to carry out screening for malnutrition
- Liaise with community nutrition nurses and services to facilitate discharge from hospital for people with a feeding tube
- See patients who need feeding into their blood stream with the Nutrition Support team
The exact amount of liquid feed needed by patients and the type of liquid feed is normally managed by a dietitian.
Last reviewed: 12 July 2022