Liberalizing Diet Orders to Enhance Patient Satisfaction and Improve Outcomes in Hospitalized Patients

Traditional hospital culture often involves prescribing restrictive diets at the time of admission and liberalizing them later as needed. This approach can inadvertently result in unnecessary dietary restrictions, particularly among older adults, contributing to decreased oral intake, increased risk of malnutrition, reduced patient satisfaction, and additional workload for care teams.

Our initiative sought to encourage providers to order regular diets upon admission and to limit therapeutic diet use to situations in which it was part of the patient’s active treatment plan or otherwise clinically necessary.

Motivation for Change

The project was inspired by prior success with a hospital-wide cardiac diet liberalization initiative, which revealed that more than 60% of cardiac diet orders were placed for patients aged 65 and older. During that process, we also identified a pattern of overuse of restrictive diet combinations and reviewed literature supporting liberalized diet approaches in acute care settings. The evidence, combined with observed patient dissatisfaction and clinical inefficiencies, motivated us to expand our efforts across our systems.