A team-medical-care is really indispensable, because diseases have been getting more diversified and medical technology has been getting more specialized. In fact, some groups are obtaining dramatic effects by its use on the critical-path, nationally guided medicine and so on. Under the circumstances, the aim of this symposium is to clarify what we nutritionists have to do as one of a team-medical-care members. A doctor, a pharmacist, a nurse and two nutritional managers analyzed the status quo and proposed several ideas. Each presenter mentioned as follows:
The doctor's point of view (Kaise): Nutritional managers should change what they do from serving meals to patients to giving them nutritional instruction. They should give patients an appropriate knowledge on their nutritional state. He put an emphasis on these two points.
The pharmacist's point of view (Uenishi): When a pharmacist cooperated with a nutritional manager, patient's condition got better. She stressed the importance of mutual corporation.
The nutritional manager's point of view (Tanaka): He introduced a newly revised law on nutritionists and showed us their roles in a team-medical-care. Furthermore, he said, "We nutritionists need broad ranged activities to exchange opinions with doctors, to participate in the daily ward-round and meeting. He added that nutritionists played an important role in critical-path and NST.
The nurse's point of view (Kobayashi): She showed the present situation in her hospital that doctors, nurses, nutritionists and others exchange necessary information and work based on it. So, a nutritionist should actively participate in the conference and the ward-round. However, the instruction for nutrition is evaluated very low under the current system, she pointed out.
Supplementary remark by the nutritional manager (Nishino): Nutritional managers who belong to the office-section at present have to be transferred to the medical-section because they are engaged in medical treatment. We will be able to work smoothly by the revised system.
The above reports showed that it almost became definite what we nutritionists should do now. That is, (1) to keep close connections with other section members by participating the daily ward-round and meeting. (2) to have knowledge to assess and correct the distorted nutritional state of patients. (3) to shift our work from serving meals to patients to giving them instruction on nutrition. We should be strongly motivated to work actively as one of medical-care members. And we should devote ourselves to support patients. Finally, our positive efforts will be highly appreciated in a medical-care-team as a result.
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