Optimizing Nutrition Education in a Dedicated Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinic

Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) frequently ask their providers for nutritional or dietary recommendations; however, providers are limited in both time and knowledge to adequately address their questions. In this single-center study, we sought to improve provider experiences with nutrition counseling for patients seen in a dedicated IBD clinic.

To understand the current state, providers, including gastroenterology fellows, attendings, and advanced practice providers were surveyed regarding their experiences with nutritional recommendations in a dedicated IBD clinic. Following the pre-intervention survey, we worked with registered dieticians on how to address key concerns and developed an informational handout based upon current guidelines. After displaying handouts in clinical workspaces for 5 weeks, providers were surveyed again to evaluate their response.

All 22 respondents (100%) in the pre-intervention survey either agreed or strongly agreed that IBD patients have unique nutritional requirements. A majority (72%) strongly agreed that the clinic would benefit from more access to dieticians. Additionally, 41% of providers either strongly disagreed or disagreed that they had enough time to address nutritional concerns. Post-intervention, 57% of respondents (8/14) reported that they found the handouts helpful. A significant number of providers reported improvement in their comfort level discussing nutrition and dietary recommendations with IBD patients, with tmean Likert score increasing from 3.5 to 4.1 (P = .01).

In this quality improvement study, we identified key issues preventing providers from addressing patient desire for nutritional counseling and developed a novel awareness campaign that significantly improved provider confidence in discussing nutritional recommendations with their IBD patients.