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.