Annual Report 2020

Nutrition Management Office

Haruka Chitose, Mihoko Inoue, Yuko Nagasu, Ryogo Shimizu, Teruyuki Tanaka, Yuki Ishigami, Miki Kuwana, Kengo Hayashi, Mei Komine, Syuri Higo, Haruka Anda, Mayuko Ishikawa, Kyoko Ishibashi, Satoshi Watanabe, Koichi Abe, Tatsuya Hirakawa, Kenichi Koshikawa, Takahiro Takahashi, Hideki Ogiwara, Akio Sairenzi, Hideki Takano

Introduction

 From April 2020 to March 2021, we focused on implementing cancer nutrition guidance. This was done as an effort to increase the amount of nutrition guidance and improve quality.

 We have established and implemented a system for nutritional guidance by a registered dietitian who has expertise with outpatient chemotherapy patients.

The Team and What We Do

 Hospitalized patient meals totaled 330,437 during this period, and we provided nutrition guidance to 5,352 individuals. Regarding discussions with NST (Nutrition Support Team), there were an average of 158 new requests per month (Table 1).

 Our many years of cooking classes did not continue as planned due to the COVID-19 infection epidemic.

 During this period, we made a leap forward by creating a video about our recipe search site "CHEER!", which was opened in 2019, and posting it on the site. This aims to help cancer patients and their families manage diet-affecting cancer symptoms.

Research activities

 During this period, we conducted research on our profession. We performed a survey of registered dietitians about the experience and burnout involved in palliative care. This survey was conducted on registered dietitians at cancer treatment base hospitals in Japan.

Education

 We have been entrusted with the clinical training from three universities.

 As a result of the COVID-19 outbreak during this period, the training was less extensive than usual.

 In human resource development, we have strengthened support so that we can obtain professional qualifications certified by academic societies. This effort resulted in one person becoming a JSPEN-certified nutrition support team specialist therapist during this period.

Future Prospects

 We plan to hold lectures about local nutrition information, the influence of diet on cancer therapy and cancer prevention, and we will disseminate practical nutritional guidance and tips.

 In addition, we will continue to develop nutritional guidance methods and nutritional guidance information tools to improve the quality of nutritional management for inpatients and outpatients.

Table 1. Number of NST consultations from April 2020 to March 2021