Background: Nutritional care for older adults provided by hospital and home care nurses and nursing assistants is
suboptimal. This is due to several factors including professionals' lack of knowledge and low prioritisation.
Affecting these factors may promote nurses' and nursing assistants' behavioral change and eventually improve
nutritional care. To increase the likelihood of successfully targeting these factors, an evidence-based educational
intervention is needed.
Objectives: To develop an educational intervention for hospital and home care nurses and nursing assistants to
promote behaviour change by affecting factors that influence current behaviour in nutritional care for older
adults. In this paper, we describe the intervention development process.
Design: A multi-methods approach using literature and expert input.
Settings: Hospital and home care.
Participants: Older adults, nurses, nursing assistants, experts, and other professionals involved in nutritional care.
Methods: The educational intervention was based on five principles: 1) interaction between intervention and
users, 2) targeting users on both individual and team level, 3) supporting direct and easy transfer to the
workplace, and continuous learning, 4) facilitating learning within an appropriate period, and 5) fitting with the
context. Consistent with these principles, the research team focussed on developing a microlearning intervention
and they established consensus on seven features of the intervention: content, provider, mode of delivery, setting,
recipient, intensity, and duration.
Results: The intervention consisted of 30 statements about nursing nutritional care for older adults, which nurses
and nursing assistants were asked to confirm or reject, followed by corresponding explanations. These can be
presented in a snack-sized way, this means one statement per day, five times a week over a period of six weeks
through an online platform.
Conclusions: Based on a well-founded and comprehensive procedure, the microlearning intervention was
developed. This intervention has the potential to contribute to nursing nutritional care for older adults.
