Annual Conference Focuses on Nutrition
This two-day event with over 2000 attendees opened with much excitement and discussions on nutrition centering on the adult population.
The 6th CSPEN (Chinese Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition) conference took place in early June and Project HOPE was front and center on Pediatric Nutrition with all our key partners at our side. CSPEN is the Chinese equivalent to ESPEN in Europe and ASPEN for America, and JSPEN in Japan.
The Shanghai Expo was the perfect forum to host this two-day event with over 2000 attendees. The first day opened with much excitement and the majority of the discussions and buzz were on nutrition centering on the adult population. Sleeves then rolled up on day two with targeted forums and Project HOPE was laser focused on Pediatric Nutrition. The HOPE Shanghai team took this opportunity to announce the selection of the 21 Pediatric Nutrition research projects at the conference. Jenny Xu from Project HOPE delivered the news and also extended the invitation to all attendees to submit their proposals for the 2013 selection cycle.
Project HOPE also sponsored seven of our outreach hospitals to attend the event. In addition, four of our abstracts from our sponsored Pediatric Nutrition programs were selected for oral presentation at the conference…nice! One in particular was on the Screening Tool for the Assessment of Malnutrition in Pediatrics (STAMP) presented by Dr. Li Hong, Director of Nutrition Department at Shanghai Children’s Medical Center (SCMC.) STAMP uses a questionnaire and numerical scale to determine the extent of a patient’s nutritional risk; this simple tool is used by healthcare professionals to determine whether nutritional care/service may be needed. SCMC is the only Pediatric hospital in China that has STAMP implemented as a standard admission screening process for all children. The STAMP process was just implemented about one year ago in partnership with Project HOPE. This standard assessment is a process required by most if not all hospital accreditation such as JCI Accreditation, as malnutrition is highly prevalent in hospitalized children and has been associated with relevant clinical outcomes. According to various studies, about 10-20% of those admitted to hospitals in different countries suffer from malnutrition or are at risk of malnutrition which is giving hospitals a cause to consider using assessment tools such as STAMP. It’s always baffling that a simple tool can sometime be complex to implement for so many reasons which is why I’m BIG advocate of keeping things simple as there are already too many complex things that truly need our attention and focus!