If you are planning to participate in the International Nutrition Survey next year: Add yourself to this year’s survey mailing list by submitting the form at the following link: If you have participated in the past, look into renewing your ethics approval before it expires If you have not participated in the past, look into obtaining ethics approval…start early because this can take several months to complete Visit for more information on how to get started, and to access all of the study resources, including guidelines on obtaining and renewing ethics approvalwww.criticalcarenutrition.com What’s new at Critical Care Nutrition and the Clinical Evaluation Research Unit? The International Nutrition Survey 2011 is just over six months away! Newsletter Issue 1 October 2010 MAY 11 th The countdown has begun! Survey Objectives: Quality Improvement To determine current nutrition practice in the adult critical care setting Illuminate gaps between best practice and current practice To identify nutrition practices to target for quality improvement initiatives Generate New Knowledge To determine factors associated with optimal provision of nutrition To determine what nutrition practices are associated with best clinical outcomes We have a new website! Have you checked out the website lately? We have worked hard to give the website a new look and lots of new features. Be sure to check out some of our quality improvement tools in the Resource Center and rate and comment on any tools you have used so that other visitors to our site can benefit from your insight and experience! We have another new website! The Critical Care Nutrition Team is part of the Clinical Evaluation Research Unit (CERU) in Kingston, Ontario. We are pleased to announce that CERU now has its own website! You can check it out at We have a new data entry site! In order to improve the data entry process for the International Nutrition Survey, we have moved to a new system called The data entry pages may look a little different, but the data being collected is still the same, and overall, we think you’ll agree that this new site is an improvement over the old one. If you’d like to check it out and give us some feedback, contact Lauren at for more information. New in the 2011 Survey: Identify Barriers to Optimal Nutrition Practices! Contact Us Daren Heyland – Principal Investigator ext Naomi Cahill – Project Leader ext Lauren Murch – Project Assistant ext For optimal nutrition practices to be successfully implemented into practice an assessment of the local barriers and enablers to guideline adherence should be completed. In this year’s International Nutrition Survey we are pleased to invite you to also complete a barriers assessment to help you understand the barriers that your ICU faces in implementing the recommendations of nutrition guidelines - specifically barriers to providing adequate enteral nutrition (EN). The results of this assessment will inform local quality improvement activities by selecting strategies designed to overcome identified barriers. The barriers assessment will involve distributing a questionnaire to your ICU staff. Sites that complete this Barriers Questionnaire will also receive a report scoring the perceived importance of specific barriers in the context of their ICU. However, participation in this initiative is optional: you do not have to distribute the Barriers Questionnaire in order to participate in the International Nutrition Survey. For further information please contact Lauren at