Southampton dietitian wins prestigious award for a nutrition awareness app
Dr Luise Marino has been presented the Rose Simmonds Award for research developing a tool to help spot nutritional risk during remote consultations.
The British Dietetic Association honour was announced at the 2022 BDA Awards in Birmingham.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become used to video calls instead of in-person healthcare appointments. But this poses many challenges, including how to assess whether a child has declining nutrition status.
Dr Marino is a Clinical Academic Paediatric Dietitian at University Hospital Southampton (UHS). She was part of an international team who developed a nutritional awareness tool for use in remote paediatric consultations. It is known as Pediatric Remote Malnutrition Application (Pedi-R-MAPP).
BDA’s most prestigious award
The Rose Simmonds Award honours original research, published in a peer-reviewed journal in the previous two years.
Dr Marino published her work in the journal Clinical Nutrition. Praising the work, the BDA said it was ‘rigorously and transparently reported and accessible to a wide readership’.
The award is named after a leading pioneer in dietetics and a person of great character. It has a distinguished beginning and a long history and is therefore the association’s most prestigious award.
Nutritional awareness - spotting the signs of risk
To develop Pedi-R-MAPP, the UHS and University of Southampton team, including Prof Mark Beattie and Prof Anne-Sophie Darlington, modified the Remote Malnutrition Application (R-MAPP) to make it suitable for children. R-MAPP had been developed to support remote nutritional assessments for adults and the authors gave their permission for their tool to be adapted for use in children.
As part of this study, the team used a set process to seek out the views of international nutrition experts to find consensus as to what the tool should contain. This included an international survey completed by 463 of paediatricians, dietitians and nurses.
Dr Marino says: “I’m honoured to be presented with this award. It’s extremely important that healthcare professionals feel supported to spot the signs of worsening nutrition status in children, despite the transition from face to face to remote consultations. I hope this nutritional awareness tool in this app will help them to do so.”
Pedi-R-MAPP is currently in Beta testing and will be available for use in the autumn.