[Nutritional Support Groups in a hospital setting. The Cuban experience]

The results achieved by a Nutritional Support Group (NSG) operating within a tertiary-level hospital in the city of Havana (CUBA) for the last 8 years are presented in this work. Results relate to the performance of the Group in the three domains of medical care, on one hand, and the inception of a Metabolic, Nutritional and Feeding Intervention Program (PRINUMA) of institutional reach, on the other. Nutritional assistance has served the purpose of demonstrating the feasibility of intervention schemes conducted under the premise of the use of the enteral route as first choice, and the benefits observed in selected cases. Teaching has always been a priority of the Group, as a tool to expose the institution's medical care teams to new ideas and novel ways of acting, in order to eliminate those undesirable practices attempting against the patient's nutriture that have arisen most of the times from myths, fallacies and dogmas. Research has been a perfect complemment of the Group's performance in the two previous domains, making possible the incorporation of nutritional support and Artificial nutrition issues into the institution's R&D portfolio. GAN's medical workup has been accompannied by the deployment of the PRINUMA, in order to respond to the challenges brought about by the recognition of disease-associated-malnutrition as an institutional health problem. The guidelines followed in this article for reporting the Group's activities can become a methodological platform for the purpose of assessment by third parties.