Development and Evaluation of a New Infant Nutrition Screening Tool

A large number of children experience undernutrition related to or resulting from their illness. The NHS has recently published standards which state that all patients should be screened for undernutrition on admission and periodically during their stay at hospital. Although, recent studies have attempted to develop appropriate nutritional screening tool for children on admission, there is no agreement concerning the most appropriate criteria to be used and they have not been validated for use in infants. The project team have developed a preliminary tool that would be both simple and quick to use in order to identify infants who are either undernourished or at risk of undernutrition on admission and who would benefit from referral for full nutritional assessment by a dietician. The purpose of this study is establish whether an infant Paediatric Yorkhill Malnutrition Score for infants would be able to distinguish infants who are well-nourished from those undernourished or at risk of undernutrition. The researchers will recruit all newly admitted patients ( 210 infants with low, medium, and high risk of undernutrition) from selected wards at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children Glasgow. The result from the infant screening tool will be compared with the rating using the longer Subjective Global Nutritional Assessment to test the ability of Infant Screening Tool to identify infants at high risk of malnutrition. The researcher will also measure the fat store using skinfolds and will compare the results among those rated high or low risk by the new tool. Finally, the utility of iPYMS score, growth trajectory, body mass index and behaviour questionnaire as predictors of low adiposity and stunting will be compared.