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Certificate in Clinical Nutrition

Overview

Clinical nutrition has emerged as an important discipline in modern medicine. Healthcare professionals are increasingly using nutrition strategies to prevent disease, manage illness and promote health. Research has shown that diet and eating habits play a major role in the development of certain chronic diseases like heart disease, obesity, cancer, and diabetes. Making changes to diet can help prevent and treat these conditions. For example, lowering certain fats and cholesterol, and adding whole grains to your diet can help prevent atherosclerosis, heart disease and stroke. Eating fewer calories helps lose weight. Cutting down on simple sugars can help prevent diabetes, and diets high in fiber can help control diabetes.

The Certificate in Clinical Nutrition course will provide healthcare practitioners with an understanding of how nutrition affects physiological and biochemical systems in the human body. Additionally, the course will provide relevant clinical information and skills to the participants. This is an innovative course that presents various aspects of nutrition to help healthcare practitioners manage their patients in a scientific manner. 

The total duration of the course is 50 hours. The onsite unit (33 hours) will comprise of lectures and interactive discussions by WCM-Q faculty and other international experts from the field. The self-study unit (17 hours) will be located on a cloud-based learning management system called Canvas, and will consist of modules complementary to the onsite lectures.

The course is intended to provide information on critical areas of nutrition. The course is open to all healthcare professionals and the content is not necessarily aimed at any specific healthcare professional group for example nutritionists, doctors etc. The course is limited to seminars and interactive discussions.
 

Identified Practice Gaps / Educational Needs

Nutrition is a complex and constantly evolving area. Nutrition has made advances but it has also generated conflicting information, making nutrition practice more complex for healthcare practitioners. Adequate up-to-date evidence based clinical nutrition knowledge is limited among healthcare professionals. Additionally, they are deficient in knowledge and skills pertaining to effective nutrition counseling, strategies for enabling behavior change in patients and being cognizant of psychosocial factors that affect nutrition.Furthermore, healthcare professionals possess insufficient knowledge pertaining to offering complementary medicine for optimum patient outcomes. Gaps in building therapeutic relationships, fostering resilience & transformative potential, wellness enhancement and self-care among patients and providing holistic patient centered care is evident in the realm of healthcare practice which must be addressed to improve patient care and patient outcomes.    


Objectives 

At the end of the course, participants will be able to: 

a) Discuss basic and clinically relevant topics that will enhance healthcare professionals' knowledge and skills in the field of nutrition. 

b) Outline the evidence in terms of benefits, limitations and risks of commonly used nutrition and herbal supplements and other dietary approaches such as elimination diets and vegetarianism.

c) Devise healthy nutrition regimens/choices tailored to individual needs including children, pregnant and lactating women and the elderly. 

d) Demonstrate the usefulness of healthy nutrition practices in specific clinical situations and conditions. 

e) Describe the role of nutrition in the causation and management of chronic conditions such as obesity, cancer and diabetes. 

Target Audience

This course is intended for healthcare professionals including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, educators, researchers, dietitians, dentists and other healthcare professionals.