- Oral presentation
- Open Access
An audit of patients with severe malnutrition secondary to eating disorders in Western Australia - a legacy of underinvestment in comprehensive care of youths and adults with eating disorders?
https://doi.org/10.1186/2050-2974-2-S1-O28
© Miller et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014
- Published: 24 November 2014
Keywords
- Eating Disorder
- Internal Audit
- Severe Malnutrition
- Service Initiative
- Adult Inpatient
From February 2012 until January 2014 an acute medical ward at a 600 bed tertiary hospital in Western Australia conducted an internal audit of youth and adult inpatient separations for patients admitted with complications of severe eating disorders. This cohort exhibited levels of severe malnutrition on par with or more severe than those managed in a specialist service in another state of comparable size, (the average BMI on admission was 12.4 range 9.8-15.8; n=12) and may reflect the fact that Western Australia is one of only two states / territories in Australia that does not have a publicly funded specialist adult inpatient eating disorders program.
Proposals for development of a state wide comprehensive specialist eating disorders service for youths and adults in Western Australia must take into account a potential legacy of decades of under investment in this area of health care, and potential barriers to optimising nutritional recovery within the confines of an activity based funding framework.
This abstract was presented in the Service Initiatives stream of the 2014 ANZAED Conference.
Authors’ Affiliations
Copyright
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
