Allied health professionals students’ nutrition knowledge and attitudes

Abstract

Background: Nutrition is an essential part of managing acute and chronic diseases as well as, maintaining health and wellness across the health care professions. Each profession must first assess its own specific competencies in nutrition before establishing useful interprofessional collaborative nutrition competencies (DiMaria-Ghalili, et al., 2014a). Interprofessional education (IPE) is recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a crucial step in developing a multidisciplinary health workforce that is better able to address local health needs. The aim of this study is therefore to determine the nutritional knowledge and attitudes of AHP students who are in their final years of their respective course. Method: An anonymous online questionnaire adapted from (Weber, 2015) was distributed between February 2023 and March 2023, following content validity and ethical approval. This included a total of 28 questions relating to demographics, knowledge of nutrition and attitudes towards nutrition. The data from responses was analysed through descriptive statistics and IBM SPSS® Statistics 28. Results: In a sample of (n=14) respondents that participated in this study, four different disciplines were studied: 5 (35.7%) communication therapy students, 4 (28.6%) applied biomedical science students, 3 (21.4%) physiotherapy students and 2 (14.3%) radiography students. A mean nutrition knowledge score of 75.5% was obtained overall, suggesting reasonable nutrition knowledge, given that a score of 75% was considered to be acceptable (Weber, 2015). Findings also suggest a general favourable attitude towards nutrition among participants, although the results of the chi-square test showed there was no significant association in the different courses (p˃0.05). Conclusion: Although the data indicates that allied health students, in general, have a positive attitude towards nutrition and collaborating with nutritionists and dietitians, further research on the subject is strongly advised because it will provide additional insight needed to achieve the goal of interdisciplinarity among allied health professionals through improved education. Results support efforts to address the issue of the need for nutrition education for healthcare professionals. For this reason, this study opens the door for future research that will aim to explore a larger and more representative sample of the targeted population in Malta.