Monitoring nutritional status accurately is a common problem within home enterally fed patients, and within the community.
Portable weighing scales would enable patients to be weighed accurately and safely at home, helping to ensure their nutritional risk is identified and can be monitored and treated in a timely matter.
This in turn assists in treatment planning, helping to identify if patients are receiving adequate nutrition whilst being enterally fed, and would potentially be less traumatic than using hoist weighing scales. The portable weighing scales would enable better patient centred care and be less invasive to patients compared to using hoist scales.
The portable weighing scales could also be used in outpatients to weigh patients wheelchair bound or patients who are too unsteady to stand unaided. This would also assist the hospital in complying with NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) standards for nutritional monitoring in outpatients. There is also the possibility of the portable weighing scales to be used in the palliative care and outpatient departments.
The Home enteral nutrition team have a total caseload across Hampshire Hospital of nearly 200 patients. About 40% of this caseload are wheelchair bound and would benefit from being able to use portable weighing scales to monitor their weight.
for the Royal Hampshire County Hospital, Winchester
“The portable weighing scales will allow us to quickly and easily gain an accurate weight for home enterally fed patients, resulting in better care planning and better outcome for our patients. They will allow for more individually tailored advice, allow accurate monitoring of effectiveness of changes, and can help early identification of potential problems, due to being so quick and easy to use.
They are estimated to be used weekly; around 72 patients have the potential to benefit from the scales in the community alone.
Very importantly, they will also allow the patient choice to be weighed in a dignified and less intrusive manner.”