The Use of a Visual Poster to Improve Oral Nutritional Supplement Consumption for Inpatient Older Adults

Malnutrition is common in inpatient older adults conferring increased morbidity and mortality. Oral nutritional supplements (ONSs) are well studied to tackle malnutrition, but the uptake among inpatient older adults is poor. A quality improvement project was conducted with a preimplementation and postimplementation design. Our multidisciplinary team did a root-cause analysis and determined lack of awareness and understanding of ONSs to be a key contributor for poor uptake. A poster was implemented as an intervention to serve as a reminder to patients and care team to boost ONS consumption. The intervention was implemented between May and July 2024. The average daily ONS consumption increased from 32.1% to 32.9%. There were no associations between variables collected and ONS uptake. Factors affecting ONS uptake are diverse, and multifaceted intervention in conjunction with a visual aid is needed to boost its uptake. Thus, additional education initiatives and multidisciplinary efforts are needed to improve ONS consumption in inpatient older adults.