Prevalent nursing diagnoses in non-institutionalized older people

Objetives: Identify possible nutritional deficiencies and establish the most prevalent nursing diagnoses in non-institutionalized older people. Material and methods: It has been carried out an exercise in which students have applied the Mini Nutritional Assessment tool to people over 65 years old of our environment who live in their own homes and apparently in good health condition. Results: 24 surveys have been carried out to old people with an average age of 82 and an age range of 68 to 90. All of them had nutrition risk and it was high in 19 of them. Four nursing diagnoses have been identified (by order of frequency): "Impaired swallowing", "Imbalanced nutrition: less than body", "Feeding self-care deficit", "Ineffective health management". However, neither the family nor the tested person had considered the possibility of consulting their general practitioner or community nurse because they assumed this risk was part of normal aging process Conclusions: The assessment of nutritional risk by screening tools is an essential requirement in the care of non-institutionalized elderly people with functional autonomy. Despite the fact that they do not usually suffer malnutrition problems, this segment of population may be in an unnoticed risk situation because of their autonomy and their apparent good health status.