Detecting Pediatric Malnutrition: Tools For Screening & Criteria For Diagnosing

Patricia Becker is a board-certified specialist in pediatric nutrition and nutrition support. She has worked at Dayton Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and the University of North Carolina Children’s Hospital, among others. In addition, she is in private practice KidsRD.com as a pediatric dietitian, specializing in pediatric undernutrition.

Ms. Becker served as chair of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Evidence Analysis Library Pediatric Nutrition Screening Project. She is the author of the Pediatric Malnutrition section of the Pediatric Nutrition Care Manual. She is a member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics/ASPEN Pediatric Malnutrition Work group and lead author of the Consensus statement for ASPEN/AND pediatric malnutrition. Ms. Becker is an author of Identifying Malnutrition in Preterm and Neonatal Populations: Recommended Indicators.

Dr White has worked as a paediatric dietitian for over 20 years and is currently the Acting Director of Dietetics and Food Services, Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service. She is the chair of the Queensland Paediatric Working Group and specialises in malnutrition treatment and prevention. Dr White’s research activities are targeted towards nutrition related clinically translatable outcomes as demonstrated by her PhD in the area of paediatric critical care nutrition. Recently, Dr White’s research direction has been malnutrition prevention and screening where she has led the National Paediatric Nutrition Snapshot Day and multi-centre translational research in paediatric nutrition screening producing the Paediatric Nutrition Screening Tool which is used internationally in major paediatric hospitals.

Associate Professor Maree Ferguson is the Director of Dietitian Connection, an online community for dietitians. Dietitian Connection provides continuing education for 11K+ global nutrition professionals via free weekly e-newsletter, podcast, webinars, digital magazine, social media and an annual conference. Maree was previously the Director of Nutrition and Dietetics at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane Australia. Prior to this, Maree was a Senior Research Scientist at Abbott Nutrition in the United States. Maree and colleagues developed the Malnutrition Screening Tool to identify patients at risk of malnutrition on hospital admission. Her innovative malnutrition-screening tool (MST) has been implemented in hundreds of hospitals worldwide.