Patient Perceptions of Clinical Nutrition Service

Choi, Ki Bo; Lee, Song Mi; Lyu, Eun Soon

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the patient perception of clinical nutrition service. The research was performed by using questionnaires and conducted from February 14 to March 15 at 42 hospitals (over 400 beds). 41.7% of patients experienced nutritional education and counseling. The mean score of the patients' perception on clinical nutritional service was 4.62/5.00 for "nutrition care is important for treatment of the disease", 4.49/5.00 for "diet therapy is necessary for treatment of the disease", 4.16/5.00 for "nutritional counseling call-centers are necessary", 4.13/5.00 for "nutritional consultation fee is required to apply insurance benefits", 4.12/5.00 for "one-to-one nutrition system is necessary", and 3.56/5.00 for "nutrition services I am willing to pay". The patients who had no past experience in nutritional education and counseling showed significantly higher scores for "nutrition care is important for treatment of the disease", "one-to-one nutritional care system is necessary", and "nutritional counseling call-centers are necessary" (P<0.05). The mean scores for the importance (4.26/5.00) and performance (3.88/5.00) of nutrition counseling service were significantly different (P<0.01). "Nutritional counseling is available whenever I want" had the highest gap score between performance and importance among nutrition counseling service items. The importance and performance grid showed that highly important items had high performance (doing great area) and less important items have low performance (low priority).