Focus on comprehensive nutrition for children and lead their healthy growth

With economic development, social progress, and improved living standards, people are paying more and more attention to health. More and more people are aware of the importance of nutrition to health, and they also know that many diseases require nutrition to cooperate with treatment. In the hospital, there is such a department that is closely related to nutrition - the clinical nutrition department. Perhaps many people are unfamiliar with the term clinical nutrition department, so let's learn about it together!

The Clinical Nutrition Department is a clinical business department that conducts nutritional diagnosis through nutritional testing and evaluation for those with nutritional metabolic changes under different physiological and pathological conditions (including those caused by diseases and iatrogenic factors), and provides nutritional treatment using various enteral nutrition preparations, parenteral nutrition preparations and therapeutic diets.

In order to guide and standardize the construction and management of clinical nutrition departments in medical institutions and improve clinical nutrition diagnosis and treatment capabilities and service levels, the National Health Commission has issued the "Guidelines for the Construction and Management of Clinical Nutrition Departments (Trial)". This guideline proposes that clinical departments that independently carry out clinical nutrition diagnosis and treatment services in medical institutions are uniformly named clinical nutrition departments. Its job responsibilities include conducting nutrition screening and evaluation, nutrition diagnosis and treatment, providing patients with medical diets, enteral and parenteral nutrition prescriptions, standardizing and guiding the use of special medical purpose foods, and formulating clinical nutrition-related work standards for the institution. The country now encourages general hospitals at or above the second level and specialized hospitals such as tumors, children, and psychiatry to set up clinical nutrition departments.

In the clinical nutrition department, the most important role is the clinical nutritionist. This type of nutrition professional and technical personnel can carry out nutrition consultation, nutrition screening or evaluation, gastrointestinal nutrition configuration, medical diet configuration, nutrition education and other tasks.

The clinical nutrition department serves a wide range of people, including infants, children, adolescents, pregnant women, the elderly, and other age groups. Today we will focus on children's clinical nutrition.

The report of "Survey on Nutrition and Health Status of Chinese Residents" shows that Chinese children have nutritional problems such as nutritional imbalance and malnutrition, which lead to increasingly serious phenomena such as growth retardation, low weight and obesity. The "Outline of China's Child Development (2011-2020)" regards improving maternal and child nutrition as an important task, and proposes a number of specific goals such as reducing the growth retardation rate, low weight rate, anemia prevalence rate, and further clarifies the strategies and measures for improving children's nutrition. Children's nutrition and health are increasingly attracting the attention of parents and society. Improving children's nutrition status and improving children's health level have become the common goals pursued by everyone. Child nutritionists are a profession born to solve children's nutrition and health problems. Qualified child nutritionists can provide reasonable diet, enteral and parenteral nutrition advice or prescriptions as needed according to the child's age, gender, constitution and physical condition or the child's condition.

Clinical nutrition pathways for children are mainly divided into the following two categories: ① Parenteral nutrition (PN): peripheral vein, PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter), CVC (central venous catheter)

② Enteral nutrition (EN): NG (nasogastric tube feeding), intraoperative percutaneous jejunostomy, PEG (percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy), PEGJ (percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy jejunal catheterization)

At the 8th Health Science Nutrition Forum, Professor Cai Wei pointed out the current problems in clinical nutrition in pediatrics in China: insufficient understanding of nutrition issues in hospitalized patients, imperfect organizational structures in children's hospitals, low proportion of reasonable nutritional support, and lack of suitable talents. The main problems in pediatric nutritional support in China in recent years are:

① Feeding problems lead to severe malnutrition, such as chronic diarrhea, anorexia, etc.

② Long-term PN-related complications, such as anemia, metabolic bone disease, etc.

③Long-term nutritional support through PN.

④Long-term EN and gastrointestinal microbiota.

The overall level of clinical nutrition in our country is still in the development stage. Although there are still many problems, as long as the public begins to understand and society begins to pay attention, I believe that the rapid development of clinical nutrition will be in the near future. Children can grow up more scientifically and healthily, and our lives will be better because of nutrition.