Health Professionals’ Perceptions of a Pediatric Nutrition Support Program Led by a Clinical Dietitian at a Low-resource Hospital Setting in Malawi (P12-028-19)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The first four dietitians graduated in Malawi in 2017, providing a new opportunity to build capacity to introduce nutrition support in an acute care setting. We designed and implemented a pediatric nutrition support program at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH) in Blantyre, Malawi including the hiring of a local dietitian in August 2018. Upon introducing this program, we aimed to qualitatively assess perceptions around the nutrition support program from the perspective of health professionals at QECH. Qualitative interviews using a narrative research approach were undertaken to understand perceptions about the nutrition support program. Participants were selected through a purposive sampling approach across the eight wards within the nutrition support program at QECH. Interviews were held with nurses (n = 5) and clinicians and surgeons (n = 11) at QECH in November and December 2018. These interviews were audio-recorded before being transcribed and themes were then coded inductively using NVivo 11 software. All participants of the qualitative interviews emphasized the importance and impact of the nutrition support program in enhancing care of hospitalized children and therefore improving child outcomes such as tolerability of clinical interventions, decreased duration of stay, and reduced risk of hospital readmission. Other themes that arose were the receptiveness of guardians of children who received nutrition support, the importance of engaging other health professionals in nutrition support, and the need for prioritization of nutrition support by the Ministry of Health to sustain and scale up this type of program in Malawi. Qualitative interviews with nurses, clinicians, and surgeons highlighted the value of nutrition support to improve quality of care in low-resource hospital settings. Integration of dietitians into the healthcare system in low- and middle-income countries like Malawi will require further advocacy around the potential for nutrition support to improve outcomes in vulnerable children. The introduction of the nutrition support program was funded by the Centre for Global Child Health Catalyst Grant from the Hospital for Sick Children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".