Nutritional risk screening by the emergency medical services: Agreement with in-hospital assessment

Early recognition of nutritional risk is important to prevent the adverse consequences of malnutrition. However, nutritional risk screening is often disregarded in hospitals.

To evaluate the agreement of nutritional risk screening results between screening performed by emergency medical services (EMS) and at the hospital ward.

The EMS used the Nutritional Risk Screening 2002 (NRS-2002) to screen the nutritional risk of community-dwelling patients aged ≥ 70 years transported to the emergency department of a large Finnish hospital. The NRS-2002 results from the EMS were compared to results obtained during hospitalization.

The EMS screened 472 patients and recognized nutritional risk in 81 (17 %). NRS-2002 was repeated at hospital ward in 97 of the screened. In about two-thirds of the cases (69 %), the EMS and ward personnel agreed on whether the patient had nutritional risk or not, and one-third of patients (31/97, 32 %) had the exact same score. The EMS tended to give lower scores (mean difference 0.70 ± 1.29, p < 0.001). Twenty-four patients considered not to be at nutritional risk according to the EMS were recognized as risk patients at the ward.

Nutritional risk screening by the EMS could help in identifying persons requiring more detailed assessment of nutritional status.