23 June 2025
At the AH-TRIP Showcase at the end of 2024, Dr Shelley Roberts received the HTQ sponsored Partnerships Award for her research project about transforming inpatient nutrition care.
An Accredited Practising Dietitian and Allied Health Research Fellow, Dr Shelley Roberts’ research draws on her clinical experience to prevent and address malnutrition among inpatients.
“With research, I realised I could work at the health system level, helping to improve health outcomes more broadly,” Shelley said.
“The AH-TRIP Showcase allowed me to raise awareness about our research, and winning the HTQ prize was a great recognition of our project’s collaborative nature.
“My research involves getting patients actively engaged in their nutritional care. It started with investigating patients’ use of new technology for meal ordering, which expanded to tracking their nutritional intake and screening their malnutrition risk, and then to a new model of care.
“Nutrition directly impacts a patient’s ability to recover, fight infection and manage their health conditions. Conversely, poor nutrition can lead to malnutrition, resulting in delayed recovery, increased infection rates, and extended hospital stays.
“In 2024, I ran a pilot at the Gold Coast University Hospital testing a combined model of care delivered by dietitian assistants who helped patients interact with the hospital’s food service technology.
“The pilot showed that it was possible to gather outcome data from patients on the ward and demonstrated the resources required to roll out this model. From our baseline to the intervention, we showed a stark improvement across all the patient-reported metrics.
“We also showed the potential cost-effectiveness of dietitian assistants assisting patients to complete their own malnutrition risk screening.
“This research has many moving parts and many stakeholders. We must conduct a larger trial, testing the model in different wards and involving staff, patients and students.”
The Allied Health—Translating Research into Practice (AH-TRIP) is an innovative Queensland initiative that aims to embed knowledge translation from research into frontline care at hospital and health services by building health practitioner workforce capacity. For more details, please visit the AH-TRIP website.
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