Is undergraduate nursing education sufficient for patient's nutrition care in today's pandemics? Assessing the nutrition knowledge of nursing students: An integrative review

Abstract

Aim: To establish whether nurses are well prepared to provide nutrition care by identifying studies that evaluated undergraduate (baccalaureate) student nurses' nutrition knowledge, practices and selfcare and to identify areas for improvement.

Background: The importance of nutrition care in health is well recognised, with poor nutrition behaviour contributing to many million deaths annually and to less resilience to COVID 19. Nurses as the largest health professional group are ideally positioned to provide basic nutrition care.

Design: Integrative Review METHODS: Whittemore & Knafl's integrative review methodology guided this review. Appropriate search terms were used in seven databases (PubMed, Medline, Embase, ProQuest Nursing and Allied Health, the Royal College of Nursing Journals, Scopus) for Undergraduate nurses' nutrition knowledge during the period 2010-2020. The quality of the studies was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool.

Results: Of the 250 studies identified, ten studies met the inclusion criteria: seven studies also investigated nurses' eating patterns and health habits. Two themes emerged from data synthesis and analysis. Nursing students lack sufficient nutrition knowledge to develop the professional capacity to provide effective nutrition care to patients; nursing students' eating patterns and health habits suggest insufficient nutrition knowledge for appropriate selfcare.

Conclusion: Improvements in undergraduate nutrition care are required. Consideration should be given to the inclusion of nutrition experts to guide nurse educators to develop and implement innovative nutrition care programmes.

Keywords: Education; Nursing; Nursing students; Nutrition; Nutritional care.