While working with my preceptor in a long-term care facility, I found several resources to be helpful to have on hand. These included a few handy pocket guides, a useful app on my phone, some evidence-based websites, and my go-to textbook. The resources a student or intern finds most helpful will depend on the environment they’re in and personal preferences, but I hope the list below of my own choices serves as a helpful starting point.
Pocket Guides:
- Pocket Guide to Nutrition Assessment
- This is the guide I reached for most often. It is well organized and enabled me to quickly refresh my memory about aspects of nutrition assessment I’d learned, plus it went into detail about special considerations when dealing with specific conditions. For example, when calculating energy, protein, and fluid needs, there are sections that cover how to approach this with patients from various demographics and health histories.
- Nutrition Focused Physical Exam (NFPE) Pocket Guide
- Not all RDNs conduct full NFPEs. Depending upon the facility, it may only be feasible to rely on a pared-down version. Experienced RDNs are able to observe and assess a patient’s nutrition status by looking for physical features such as sunken orbitals or prominent clavicles. Whether doing a full exam or looking for easily observed features such as these, this is a helpful resource to guide interns through the process.
- Pocket Guide to Spanish for the Nutrition Professional
- Interns working in urban communities or in places with sizable Spanish-speaking populations may find this one particularly useful. While there’s no replacement for Spanish fluency, an intern with some degree of Spanish competency can better communicate with the dietetics-related vocabulary offered in this guide.
- Various other pocket guides are available on medical nutrition therapy for specific conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure. Interns may wish to get the ones on conditions they see most frequently in their particular facility’s patient population.
*All of these pocket guides are available for purchase, in print or digital form, from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) website at www.eatrightstore.org. Student pricing is available to AND members.
Apps/Websites:
- eNCPT
- This is the electronic Nutrition Care Process Terminology website, and it has been one of my most frequented sites throughout school. It hosts a wealth of information on the nutrition care process using the ADIME model. It’s a handy reference tool when looking up specific diagnoses, getting clarity on assessment criterium, and more. The “Reference Sheets” tab has much of this information in handy “cheat sheets”. As with the pocket guides, AND offers the eNCPT at a discounted price for students.
- EAL
- The AND Evidence Analysis Library is the first place many RDNs and interns look for the most current evidence-based guidelines in medical nutrition therapy. I find it easiest to navigate this site by going to the index and selecting the appropriate condition or topic, then navigating through the tabs on the left.
- Nutriguides
- Here’s a handy smartphone app that organizes everything from the EAL in a way that I find more intuitive than the EAL website. It’s easy to locate guidelines on many conditions and topics, and their clear ratings system is helpful in determining how strong the evidence is for each recommendation. I was also able to use it in a facility where the computers had restricted access, inhibiting my ability to use the EAL.
- Canva
- This app is accessible on any desktop or laptop computer, and is a great tool I’ve recently discovered. It isn’t nutrition-specific, but it is perfect for creating professional, aesthetically pleasing publications for nutrition education or school and internship assignments. Canva has an intuitive interface that allows the user to quickly create flyers, posters, presentations, social media posts, and more.
Books and Other Publications:
- Krause’s Food & the Nutrition Care Process, by L. Kathleen Mahan and Janice L. Raymond
- This was, hands-down, the most utilized textbook in my classes. It covers all of the topics found in the above-mentioned pocket guides and more, but in much more detail. While it was a bit hefty to lug into my facility every day, having it at home was a must. I’d recommend getting the most recent edition when possible.
- Food Medication Interactions, by Zaneta M. Pronsky
- This is the classic bible of medications and their food interactions. Learning the names and uses of every medication was one of the hardest parts of my clinical experience, so a resource like this is very helpful. Unfortunately, this book is now somewhat infamously out of print. If you’re lucky enough to have a copy from your classes, hold onto it! Otherwise, the best alternative may be to Google each medication and reference reliable websites like http://www.mayoclinic.org.
