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Aim: High-quality documentation in patient records is essential for patient safety and plays a prominent role in the delivery and evaluation of dietetic/nutrition care. We aimed to evaluate dietitians' documentation in patient records according to the four steps in the Nutrition Care Process: assessment, diagnosis, intervention and monitoring/ evaluation. Methods: A retrospective audit of 147 systematically collected outpatient dietetic notes from primary care centres and hospitals in central Sweden was performed using a validated audit instrument. The instrument was used to assess the documentation of 14 items: 10 items focusing on the Nutrition Care Process steps and four items on language clarity and structure, with a maximum total score of 26 for each dietetic note. The notes were divided into three different quality levels, A (high score), B (medium score) or C (low score). Comparisons were made between notes from primary care and hospitals. Results: The audit showed that the majority of the notes were placed at level B, scoring 13.5-19.5. Only 3% of the notes scored higher than 19.5. The most frequently documented items were intervention (90%), evaluation (70%) and nutrition problem (56%), whereas the least documented items were nutrition prescription (15%), goal of intervention (9%) and connection of problem-etiology-symptom (5%). Flaws in lingual clarity were common (72%). Primary care notes received higher scores than those from hospitals. Conclusions: The audit shows that Swedish dietetic documentation needs to be improved, for example, by further training and education in the Nutrition Care Process and its standardised terminology.

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Adequate documentation in medical records is important for high-quality health care. Documentation quality is widely studied within nursing, but studies are lacking within dietetic care. The aim of this study was to translate, elaborate and evaluate an audit instrument, based on the four-step Nutrition Care Process model, for documentation of dietetic care in medical records. The audit instrument includes 14 items focused on essential parts of dietetic care and the documentation's clarity and structure. Each item is to be rated 0-1 or 0-2 points, with a maximum total instrument score of 26. A detailed manual was added to facilitate the interpretation and increase the reliability of the instrument. The instrument is based on a similar tool initiated 9 years ago in the United States, which in this study was translated to Swedish and further elaborated. The translated and further elaborated instrument was named Diet-NCP-Audit. Firstly, the content validity of the Diet-NCP-Audit instrument was tested by five experienced dietitians. They rated the relevance and clarity of the included items. After a first rating, minor improvements were made. After the second rating, the Content Validity Indexes were 1.0, and the Clarity Index was 0.98. Secondly, to test the reliability, four dietitians reviewed 20 systematically collected dietetic notes independently using the audit instrument. Before the review, a calibration process was performed. A comparison of the reviews was performed, which resulted in a moderate inter-rater agreement with Krippendorff's α = 0.65-0.67. Grouping the audit results in three levels: lower, medium or higher range, a Krippendorff's α of 0.74 was considered high reliability. Also, an intra-rater reliability test-retest with a 9 weeks interval, performed by one dietitian, showed strong agreement. To conclude, the evaluated audit instrument had high content validity and moderate to high reliability and can be used in auditing documentation of dietetic care.