Perioperative nutrition in the light of guidelines (and in the shadow of practice)

Nutritional support is one of the fundamental conditions of a successful outcome in malnourished or critically ill patients. Malnutrition is an important negative factor with impacts on postoperative morbidity and lethality in surgical patients. It is often observed in particularly in oncosurgical patients, in the elderly and in patients with chronic intestinal disease. The issue of malnutrition should be medically managed from the very moment the ill person becomes a patient. The effort of correcting malnutrition should extend over the entire perioperative period – from the beginning of the diagnostic procedure, during the hospital stay with surgery as applicable with postoperative nutrition therapy, to nutritional status monitoring after discharge and in the course of subsequent follow-up in the outpatient setting. Recent European and Czech guidelines adopted by the Czech Surgical Society and by the other societies exist for this complex issue. However, the use of these guidelines often encounters barriers in practice, and their implementation rate is thus rather low. Nutrition care is a mandatory part of the management of surgical patients both in the outpatient and hospital settings of the entire process. The article is a commented selection of nutritional guidelines of the European Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (ESPEN) of 2017 for surgical patients, and of those resulting from consensual voting of the working group of the Czech Society for Clinical Nutrition and Intensive Metabolic Care (SKVIMP) of 2018.