The Value of Aritficial Diet and Complex Care in Home Nutrition

Stanley Dudrick's Memorial Hospital

Status

Completed

Conditions

Dietary Modification

Treatments

Dietary Supplement: HEN

Study type

Observational

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT02122120

HEN1

Details and patient eligibility

About

Home enteral nutrition (HEN) has always been recognized as a life-saving procedure, but with the ongoing economic crisis influencing health care, its cost-effectiveness has been questioned recently.

Objective: The unique reimbursement situation in Poland enabled the otherwise ethically unacceptable, hence unavailable, comparison of the period of no-feeding and the long-term feeding and the subsequent analyses of the clinical value of the latter and its cost-effectiveness.

Full description

Background: Home enteral nutrition (HEN) has always been recognized as a life-saving procedure, but with the ongoing economic crisis influencing health care, its cost-effectiveness has been questioned recently.

Design: The observational multicentre study in the group of 456 HEN patients was performed between January 2007 and July 2013. Two twelve-month periods were compared. During the first one patients were tube fed with home-made diet without monitoring, while during the other the complex HEN was carried out. The latter included tube feeding and complex monitoring by nutrition support team. Number of complications, hospital admissions, length of hospital stay (LOS), biochemical and anthropometric parameters and costs of hospitalization were compared.

Enrollment

456 patients

Sex

All

Volunteers

No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

indications for home tube feeding (HTF),
complete present and past medical history,
tube feeding for at least twelve months before HEN and at least twelve months afterwards.

Exclusion criteria