Malnutrition doesn’t always announce itself. A resident can lose weight for weeks before anyone puts the pieces together, especially if they’re older, has a long-term condition, or struggles to say what they need.
Spotting it means screening every resident consistently, not just when someone happens to notice a problem. That’s hard when your team spans a wide range of experience, when a service user’s height or weight can’t always be measured in the usual way, and when every assessment needs to hold up the day a regulator asks to see it.
Get the process wrong and it’s a service user going without support they needed weeks ago. Get it right and you’ve got a clear, evidenced line from screening through to care plan, whenever anyone asks to see it.
What this ebook covers
This guide walks through the ‘MUST’ score, the five-step tool used across care homes, hospitals and community settings to catch the risk of malnutrition early.
We cover how the score is actually built (BMI, weight loss and the effect of acute illness), what each risk band means for the person in front of you, and what to do when you can’t get an accurate height or weight reading the normal way.
What's inside:
- You’ll know exactly how a MUST score is calculated, and which three components go into it.
- You’ll understand what to do for every risk band, from routine monitoring at 0 through to referring to a dietitian at 2 or more.
- You’ll have two reliable ways to estimate height and weight when a service user can’t be measured directly, using ulna length or mid-upper arm circumference.
- You’ll see how CareDocs Cloud pulls all three components together automatically, so the MUST score lands in the Care Plan without you cross-checking it against the score cards by hand.
