Pharmaceutical Aspects of Nutritional Management

My work presents an extensive overview of the potential fields of action for pharmacists within a nutritional support team. This highlights many aspects of clinical nutrition and nutritional management where pharmacists can get involved and make a valuable contribution to improve nutritional treatment quality and safety and efficiency, based on best knowledge, expertise and skills.
The different projects conducted during this thesis are grouped in four main topics; nutritional management, specific care, laboratory assessment and practical examples. They give a comprehensive overview of the core tasks of pharmacists within nutritional care. This includes the spectrum between identification of malnourished patients and implementation of hospital-wide strategies to fight malnutrition. Multimodal interventions comprising effective teaching and innovative training of hospital staff members and other healthcare professionals are mandatory to raise awareness, knowledge, abilities and skills. A further important task is the specific pharmaceutical counselling for patients during clinical ward rounds, optimizing quality of care and patient safety (monitoring and handling), and subsequently quality of life.