Interdisciplinary Discrepancies Between Parenteral Nutrition Macronutrient Prescribing and Recommendations: Is Body Mass Index a Factor?

Background: Formal nutrition training in medical schools and residencies is lacking and needed. Registered dietitians (RDs) are formally trained in nutrition support and considered experts in the nutrition field. Our purpose was to examine prescribing and recommending discrepancies of parenteral nutrition macronutrients between medical residents (MRs) and RDs and compare results with the ASPEN clinical care guidelines. We also looked at discrepancies among obese patients, due to their increased risk of mortality. Materials and Methods: The primary end point of this retrospective review was discrepancies in nonprotein calories (NPCs) and grams of protein (PRO) between MRs and RDs. The secondary end point was discrepancies in NPCs and PRO between MRs and RDs among patients stratified by body mass index category. Results: MRs prescribed 300 NPCs more versus RDs (P < .001). When compared with RDs, MRs prescribed fewer NPCs for underweight patients and more for obese patients (P < .001). The same analysis found that the PRO discrepancies significantly varied by body mass index classification as well (P = .022). When these results were compared with the ASPEN clinical care guidelines, RDs adhered closer to the guidelines than did MRs in terms of permissive underfeeding of obese patients. Conclusion: It is widely accepted that MRs are in need of increased formal training, and the results of our study confirm this need and suggest a short‐term solution of increasing order‐writing privileges for the RD. RDs with this privilege may adhere more closely to clinical care guidelines and therefore increase patient safety.     

Creating Supportive Breastfeeding Policies in Early Childhood Education Programs: A Qualitative Study from a Multi-Site Intervention

Objectives To understand the process by which early childhood education (ECE) providers effectively used an existing intervention to facilitate the creation or strengthening of a written breastfeeding policy, understand the factors important to this process, and present a logic model to guide future intervention design and evaluation. Methods A purposive sample of interviewees who recently completed an ECE nutrition and physical activity intervention and reported positive pre-post scores for breastfeeding support were recruited to complete semi-structured interviews. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded, following a Grounded Theory approach. Results The ECE programs (n?=?23) had a written breastfeeding policy and were located across six states in the United States. The most common aspects of breastfeeding support covered in the policies were handling and storing of breastmilk, pieces of equipment to be provided (e.g., breast pump), and the creation of a space or room designated for breastfeeding and pumping. Many factors important to the policy creation process were identified such as motivation, education, technical assistance, perceptions of parental indifference, staff buy-in, and time and administrative constraints. Once motivated to create a policy, ECE providers described actions, such as gathering background information and model policies, discussing policy needs with stakeholders, utilizing technical assistance, and overcoming barriers. Conclusions for Practice From these findings, a logic model was created to guide future intervention design and evaluation, and several recommendations were made to help guide subsequent interventions in promoting the development and implementation of written breastfeeding policies at ECE programs.     

A scaling approach to record linkage

With increasing availability of large datasets derived from administrative and other sources, there is an increasing demand for the successful linking of these to provide rich sources of data for further analysis. Variation in the quality of identifiers used to carry out linkage means that existing approaches are often based upon ‘probabilistic’ models, which are based on a number of assumptions, and can make heavy computational demands. In this paper, we suggest a new approach to classifying record pairs in linkage, based upon weights (scores) derived using a scaling algorithm. The proposed method does not rely on training data, is computationally fast, requires only moderate amounts of storage and has intuitive appeal. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Development of a Multidisciplinary Medical Home Program for NICU Graduates

Maternal and Child Health Journal - Typical primary care practices are often not equipped to meet the medical, developmental or social needs of infants discharged from a neonatal intensive care...     

“Power of Mom”: A Mixed Methods Investigation of Mothers’ Influence on Women’s Contraceptive Attitudes and Behaviors

Maternal and Child Health Journal - Unintended pregnancy is an individual and public health problem with significant social and economic consequences. The literature has established that parents,...