BRINGING NUTRITION EDUCATION INTO THE MEDICAL CURRICULUM

BRINGING NUTRITION EDUCATION INTO THE MEDICAL CURRICULUM

Nutritank is an innovative information hub for food, nutrition and lifestyle medicine. It is promoting the need for greater education in medical training around nutrition and lifestyle medicine. Nutritank was created in 2017 by two UK medical students (now junior doctors) Dr Iain Broadley and Dr Ally Jaffee, as they were both frustrated by the lack of nutrition in their course whilst studying at Bristol University.

What is the problem?

The General Medical Council (GMC) publishes guidelines on the competencies expected from UK medical schools, however there are no set quantities or qualities for nutrition education. A recent study found that 95% of participants (medical students and doctors) believed that doctors play an important role in providing nutrition care, yet 70% reported receiving fewer than 2 hours of nutrition teaching whilst at medical school (Macaninch et al., 2020). Lack of knowledge has been reported as the most common barrier to providing nutrition advice for patients. A comprehensive review is required to really understand where the gaps in nutrition education lie.

Why Nutritank is there to fill the gap and solve this problem

Nutritank now has 25 medical school branches with over 600 medical students and junior doctors signed up to support the cause. They aim to provide their members and followers with evidencedbased information on nutrition and lifestyle to enable them to utilise this in their training and careers to enable their patients to make positive and sustainable changes to improve their health. As well as championing improved nutrition education, they are also raising this issue within the media. Using their social media and podcast to increase their reach has been hugely successful.

Challenges, achievements and collaborations

Getting nutrition into the curriculum hasn’t been easy, there are a number of barriers including full teaching schedules and limited student engagement. Nutritank is currently reviewing the current national medical curricula within the Association for Nutrition inter-professional working group tasked by the GMC. This has been a 3 year project working alongside other stakeholders including the British Dietetic Association. The new curriculum will be published in Autumn. They have formed a coalition with NNedPro Global Centre for Nutrition and Health and Culinary Medicine UK who share the belief in promoting greater nutrition and lifestyle medicine in medical education. The co-founders have recently been accepted on the NHS clinical entrepreneur training programme. This programme aims to provide its participants with the skills, knowledge and experience to successfully develop and spread innovative solutions to challenges facing the NHS to benefit both patients and staff. They have won a number of awards including the Pat Llewellyn New Talent Award in the BBC Food and Farming Award in 2019, and co-Founder Dr Jaffee being awarded the prestigious Diana Award in July.

Vision for future and upcoming projects

Nutritank has several exciting upcoming projects including a weight stigma education project, cooking programmes in mental health facilities and ongoing expansion of the junior doctors network. Also Agrinourish; a farming project getting medics onto farms to learn about the food system in a practical manner.

Their vision for the future is to work proactively with dietitians and other registered nutrition professionals to provide basic dietary advice and refer appropriately. Nutritank are driving changes to the curriculum. Integrating nutrition into current modules, rather than a standalone module, would be more beneficial to allow students to appreciate the relevance of nutrition and its application in different clinical specialities.

Nutritank hopes to be at the forefront of conversations and action around the intersection between food, lifestyle and health, and to become the go-to hub for information and community engagement.