Literature Review- Nutrition in the Elderly

The purpose of this assignment is to review literature based on the chosen subject “Nutrition in the Elderly”. It will look at different aspects of best nursing practice in this area. Firstly it will discuss briefly what a literature review is and then how the literature search was carried out, and outline any limitations in the findings. It will also provide a brief outlook on elderly nutrition to give a reader a basic knowledge of the issues in the area of care. Following on from this the assignment, will then discuss and criticise the best nursing practice in the main themes that arose in the literature search. The main themes that will be discussed are Malnutrition, how malnutrition has an effect on dementia, Assessment Screening tools and Communication. The reasons for choosing this subject is that while participating in an online blog in university I developed an interest in this area of practice. With an increasingly elderly population knowledge of this subject will be a fundamental requirement of future nursing practice.

A literature review is carried out when researching a particular topic. In order to do this the researcher has to conduct a literature search on their chosen subject. This should be up to date and reliable, Cronin,P, Ryan,F and Coughlan,M (2007). The point of a literature review is to bring the reader up to date with the most recently published information on the chosen topic. The review will also is to increase the writers understanding of the chosen topic.
A systematic review of the literature was carried out. According to parahoo (2006) a systematic review is a way of searching for literature, appraise, link together and give a summary of the information the writer had gathered. The chosen topic was “nutrition in the