Nutrition Support in the Intensive Care: Unit Adequacy, Timeliness, and Outcomes

Nutrition support is commonly used as supportive care in critically ill patients, either to treat existing malnutrition or to prevent development of nutritional deficiencies. Critical care nurses are important in this supportive therapy because they administer nutritional formulas to critically ill patients. A number of clinical trials indicated the benefits of providing nutrition support, particularly enteral feedings, to critically ill patients. Important outcomes such as rates of infection, lengths of stay, and costs can be decreased by the early initiation of enteral feedings.^1–,6 Despite knowledge of these benefits, the actual nutrition support received by patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) is not always optimal for various reasons. Overfeeding by any route of nutrition support can be detrimental, and inadequate provision of nutrition support or underfeeding, which is more common in tube-fed patients, can also be harmful^7–,10 (Table 1). Additionally, because provision of...