Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-13-2024
Manuscript Version
vor
Abstract
The nutritionDay research initiative, sponsored by the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism (ESPEN) since 2006, is a global effort to describe nutrition risk and nutrition interventions in hospitals and nursing homes, with the goal that increased awareness of malnutrition will lead to improved patient care.1,2 The nutritionDay coordinating center provides standardized forms that investigators at participating hospitals use to collect data from both the health record and directly from the patient.1 NutritionDay has been a successful initiative, collecting and pooling data from almost 300,000 patients across 72 countries and leading to at least 40 publications.2,3 Participation in nutritionDay also benefits the contributing facilities by providing them local data that can be compared year-over-year and to similar facilities, and by raising awareness of malnutrition.1,2 The nutritionDay forms are designed to make data collection simple and ensure that individuals charged with collecting data at participating sites do not require special nutrition expertise to complete them.1 In the United States, conducting research is part of the expectation of required experiential supervised practice training (ie, completed in a dietetics internship to become a registered dietitian4 as mandated by the Accreditation Council on Education in Nutrition and Dietetics [ACEND]). Independent of ACEND requirements, research is incorporated into many graduate-level nutrition training programs. However, particularly in non-thesis Master’s degree programs, there may be little time in the curriculum or limited faculty bandwidth to support mentoring individual student research projects. Many dietetics internship directors express confusion or lack of confidence in implementing the ACEND research competency.5 Thus, new approaches are needed that provide high-quality research experiences that are manageable within the program context. This paper describes how students can be involved in the collection of nutritionDay data, contributing to the global dataset, to knowledge at a local facility, and to the students’ own education.
Publication Title
Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
Rights
© 2024 The Author. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Rosa K. Hand, Meaningful Research in a Non-Thesis Master's Program: Description of nutritionDay in a Combined MS/DI Program, Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Volume 124, Issue 4, 2024, Pages 447-452, ISSN 2212-2672, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jand.2024.01.006..