Nutritional care is a human right: Translating principles to clinical practice.

We have previously advocated that nutritional care be raised to the level of a human right, in close relationship to two well-recognized fundamental rights: the right to food and the right to health. This article aims to analyze the implication of nutritional care as a human right for healthcare practitioners. We will focus on the impact of the Human Rights Basic Approach (HRBA) on healthcare professionals (HCPs), namely how they can translate HRBA into routine clinical practice. Ethics and human rights are guiding values for clinical nutrition practitioners. Together they ensure a patient-centered approach, in which the needs and rights of the patients are of the most significant importance. Human rights are based on the powerful idea of equal dignity for all people while expressing a set of core values, including fairness, respect, equality, dignity, and autonomy (FREDA). Through the analysis of FREDA principles, we have provided the elements to understand human rights and how an HRBA can support clinicians in the decision-making process. Clinical practice guidelines in clinical nutrition should incorporate disease-specific ethical issues and the HRBA. The HRBA should contribute to building conditions for HCPs to provide optimal and timely nutritional care. Nutritional care must be exercised by HCPs with due respect for several fundamental ethical values: attentiveness, responsibility competence, responsiveness, and solidarity.

Early Impact of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 on Pediatric Clinical Research: A Pan-European and Canadian Snapshot in Time.

OBJECTIVE: To capture the early effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on pediatric clinical research. STUDY DESIGN: Pediatric clinical research networks from 20 countries and 50 of their affiliated research sites completed two surveys over one month from early May to early June 2020. Networks liaised with their affiliated sites and contributed to the interpretation of results through pan-European group discussions. Based on first detection dates of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), countries formed 1 early detecting and 1 late detecting cluster. We tested the hypothesis that this clustering influenced clinical research. RESULTS: Research sites were first impacted by the pandemic in mid-March 2020 (March 16 ± 10 days, the same date as lockdown initiation; P = .99). From first impact up until early June, site initiation and feasibility analysis processes were affected for >50% of the sites. Staff were redirected to COVID-19 research for 44% of the sites, and 75.5% of sites were involved in pediatric COVID-19 research (only 6.3% reported COVID-19 cases in their other pediatric trials). Mitigation strategies were used differently between the early and late detecting country clusters and between countries with and without a pediatric COVID-19 research taskforce. Positive effects include the development of teleworking capacities. CONCLUSIONS: Through this collaborative effort from pediatric research networks, we found that pediatric trials were affected and conducted with a range of unequally applied mitigations across countries during the pandemic. The global impact might be greater than captured. In a context where clinical research is increasingly multinational, this report reveals the importance of collaboration between national networks.

Clinical Nutrition and Human Rights. An International Position Paper.

The International Working Group for Patients' Right to Nutritional Care presents its position paper regarding nutritional care as a human right intrinsically linked to the right to food and the right to health. All people should have access to food and evidence-based medical nutrition therapy including artificial nutrition and hydration. In this regard, the hospitalized malnourished ill should mandatorily have access to screening, diagnosis, nutritional assessment, with optimal and timely nutritional therapy in order to overcome malnutrition associated morbidity and mortality, while reducing the rates of disease-related malnutrition. This right does not imply there is an obligation to feed all patients at any stage of life and at any cost. On the contrary, this right implies, from an ethical point of view, that the best decision for the patient must be taken and this may include, under certain circumstances, the decision not to feed. Application of the human rights-based approach to the field of clinical nutrition will contribute to the construction of a moral, political, and legal focus to the concept of nutritional care. Moreover, it will be the cornerstone to the rationale of political and legal instruments in the field of clinical nutrition.