LIMA, OH (WLIO) - Patients in a hospital will all have different needs, depending on what they are experiencing, and one department in a hospital like Mercy Health St. Rita's that helps with patient needs across the board is dietetics. Dieticians at St. Rita's help patients in outpatient areas like bariatric weight loss, the cancer center, and dialysis to name a few. There are also clinical dieticians that help to make sure that hospitalized patients have their nutritional needs met.
Dieticians at St. Rita's help patients in outpatient areas like bariatric weight loss, the cancer center, and dialysis to name a few.
"We see patients of all ages, including the infants in the special care nursery, and people in many different disease states, like those with heart failure, respiratory failure, liver problems, a lot of patients with diabetes," said Heather Ciminillo.
Heather Ciminillo is the lead clinical dietician at St. Rita's, and she works in the intensive care unit, where often patients are sedated or on equipment, and need to have a feeding tube installed to be sure that they are receiving proper nutrition. She adds that the work that her department does is crucial for the recovery of patients across several areas of the hospital.
"As a dietitian, we do a lot of assessment; we do a lot of calculating by looking at patient’s labs and their medications and what’s going on with them medically, and then determine what their nutrient needs are to develop a proper nutrition prescription," said Ciminillo. "Proper nutrition care is very important to a patient’s recovery process, and the nice thing is that dietitians are very interdisciplinary. On a normal day, I’ll talk with a pharmacist, a speech therapist, physical therapy, occupational nurses, physicians, kind of the whole gamut."
More information on the dietetics department at St. Rita's can be found here: https://www.mercy.com/health-care-services/dietetics-clinical-nutrition.
To become a dietician, Ciminillo says that someone will need to earn their bachelors in food and nutrition at an accredited university, and would need to do a post-graduate experience to work towards a masters degree. After that, they can take the registration examination and earn a license in dietetics. St. Rita's works with students at Bluffton University to help them earn some of those hours by working with patients.
"The undergraduate students who are currently seniors come here their senior year and do get 100 hours of clinical experience before they enter that postgraduate phase, so that’s a nice aspect of that and they can do it all at the one university," said Ciminillo.
More information on the dietetics department at St. Rita's can be found here: https://www.mercy.com/health-care-services/dietetics-clinical-nutrition.
