If I'm new to the Nutrition Care Process (NCP) and IDNT, where do I start?

A recent survey in Middle Eastern countries asked dietitians and nutritionists about their awareness, knowledge and use of the Nutrition Care Process and the standardized terminology.  They also identified questions they would like answered.  One of the questions was:  "If I am new to the Nutrition Care Process (NCP) and IDNT, where do I start?"  

There are a lot of resources available to you at no charge.  Some of these are located on the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and are available to you even if you are not a member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

One of the first things you may want to do is to check out the Academy's website for Nutrition Care Process information for Health Professionals   It is located at:  health professionals information on the eatright.org website. (http://www.eatright.org/HealthProfessionals/content.aspx?id=7077)  

Another source of information is to the International NCP page, which is free to all and allows for discussion of international implementation issues at http://aincp.webauthor.com/ .  Although the website asks you to "register" there is no fee associated with registration and use of the site at this time.

When you access these sites, a way to get started might be the following:
1) read the article , Nutrition Care Process, Update Part 1, that describes the current model and the content of each of the steps.  This is a comprehensive description of the entire model as well as the steps in the nutrition care process.

2) Then read each of the snapshots as a review of the article's high points.  These are intended to be quick and easy references for each of the steps.  This document downloads 4 pages, a one page summary for each of the four steps in the nutrition care process:  Nutrition Assessment, Nutrition Diagnosis, Nutrition Intervention, and Nutrition Monitoring and Evaluation.

3) After getting an overview of the Nutrition Care Process, then you may want to read the article about the standardized language,  Part 2 of the Nutrition Care Process Update.  This article summarizes the way the terminology was created, organized and the basics on how to use it.

4) At this point you may want to find someone who is using it that you can discuss with them, or you may want to start looking at cases to see what it looks like in practice and will likely want to attend a workshop where you use cases to work with applying the NCP and terminology.  You could also read older blog issues on specific topics that you find challenging.

 If this was your question, please let me know if this was helpful.