Volume 2 Supplement 1

Proceedings of the 2014 Australia and New Zealand Academy for Eating Disorders (ANZAED) Conference: Driven Bodies Driven Brains

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?

  • Lisa Miller1, 2,
  • Mary Bronson1Email author,
  • Jan Fountaine1,
  • Charlotte Simmonds1,
  • Kiera James2,
  • Warren Ward3,
  • Adam Murphy1,
  • Sivanthe Senaratne1 and
  • Robyn Lawrence1
Journal of Eating Disorders20142(Suppl 1):O28

https://doi.org/10.1186/2050-2974-2-S1-O28

©  Miller et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014

Published: 24 November 2014

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

(1)
Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital
(2)
North Metro Area Mental Health Service
(3)
Royal Brisbane & Women's Hospital

Copyright

© Miller et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014

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.

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