Clinical Nutrition Open Science (Jun 2023)
The advantages of home-care enteral nutrition
Abstract
Summary: Home-care Enteral Nutrition (HEN) is used when patients are unable to feed orally, ensuring the correct and complete administration of essential substances for the health of the body. In Italy, a total of 16,400 patients with HEN have been estimated through a survey carried out in 2012 and the 2005–2012 period saw a significant rise in the number of people needing artificial nutrition. A consensus work involving some of the major Italian HEN experts and stakeholders has been carried out using the Nominal Focus Group technique and Delphi method to discuss HEN and explore the general clinical advantages of commercial preparation. The resulting document presented here focuses on bolus administration with commercial preparations and consequently on the potential advantages of a new bolus administration with a 250 ml Smartflex technology, which simplifies administration by allowing the direct connection of the bottle to the feeding tube.This work has highlighted how bolus administration with commercial preparations can represent a valid tool for the delivery of HEN, improving QoL and psychological well-being, limiting the impact of the disease on social life and eventually bringing pharmaco-economic benefits for the national health system due to waste reduction of both product and devices.
