Where is the nurse in nutritional care?

Editorial: Nurses have the expertise and responsibility to ensure that patients and clients’ nutritional needs are met. Providing nutrition screening and appropriate nutrition advice is essential to improve healthy eating and subsequent health outcomes. Non-communicable diseases are often associated with modifiable risk factors. Four key modifiable risk factors, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, tobacco use, and harmful consumption of alcohol, have shown the strong links with increased risk of non-communicable diseases (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2013;World Health Organization, 2003). The world’s population is rapidly ageing; the proportion of people aged over 60 years is growing faster than other age groups (World Health Organization, 2016) and will double by 2050, the impact will be an increase from 605 million to 2 billion. This will be compounded by a quadrupling of the number of people aged 80 and over by 2050 (World Health Organization, 2015). Non-communicable diseases are the leading cause of death in the world, representing 63% of all annual deaths.