Mini Nutritional Assessment tool validation project

Background: The health status of older people is usually overlooked in many low-income countries like Ethiopia. Appropriate nutritional assessment improves the health of old age people. The Mini Nutritional Assessment tool is a noninvasive and cheap practical evaluation tool that provides a simple and quick method of evaluating the nutritional status of old age people. The tool has multiple versions of confirmed validity in diverse languages, except in Amharic. Furthermore, the tool has still not been properly validated for Ethiopian old age people. Objective: The purpose of this study was to translate the Mini Nutritional Assessment tool into the Amharic language and validate it among old age people in Bahir Dar City. Methods: This tool translation and validation study followed normal COSMIN Study design and reporting guidelines. The study was conducted in three stepwise phases from January 16 to March 13, 2021. The first phase was reviewing and selecting nutritional assessment tools f..., Study design and period A cross-sectional study design was conducted from January 16 to March 13, 2021. Study population This study utilized two groups of the population. The first group was health care experts used for content validation, and the second group was community-dwelling old age people for psychometric validation. Sample size and sampling procedures For the expert judgment, 10 healthcare experts were selected based on the guideline recommendation for the Delphi technique. Two health care professionals each from human nutrition and clinical pharmacy trained at masters’ degree level, nurses trained at BSc level, general medical practitioners, and internists were selected as the panelists. These professionals were selected based on the maximum variation or heterogeneous purposive sampling for their professional experience in the care of old age people. Furthermore, their familiarity with research (at least in his/her graduate paper) and a minimum of one year of working experien..., The International Business Machines Corporation Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (IBM SPSS) version 23 was used to analyze the data.Â