MedTrace Logo

Screening the Patient for Oral Intake: Applicability of the Yale Swallow Protocol in Patients Across Disease Categories

NCT06171165 · Status: COMPLETED · Type: OBSERVATIONAL · Enrollment: 502

Last updated 2024-10-22

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

With 98 swallow screening tools already developed, dysphagia remains under-screened and undiagnosed. Even for patients at high risk of oropharyngeal dysphagia (i.e., hospitalized aged, post-stroke, Parkinson's disease, head and neck cancer, or those had ≥ 48 hours of endotracheal intubation), swallow screening is not systematically performed. Nurses, as front-line providers, are bombarded with patients' dysphagia. We witnessed patients' subsequent poor outcomes, including delayed oral intake, dependence on the feeding tube, increased pneumonia, prolonged hospital length of stay, and increased in-hospital.

Despite many calls for nurses to perform bedside screens for timely management, there is a lack of census on what tools to use (98 available, many claimed to be valid) and whether nurses are capable of safely performing these screens, especially when facing across-disease patients. Without a screening tool that is used universally across different diseases to assess whether patients can safely engage in oral intake, clinical healthcare professionals will face significant challenges in conducting the screening. Meanwhile, we found the common, shared items, i.e., consciousness, voice/speech, coughing, oral motor movements, and water drinking tests or swallowing trials, are included in most swallow screening tools, suggesting these items are essential basics for oral intake safely.

Therefore, instead of creating a new screening tool, the aim of this study is to extract the common, shared items among existing swallowing screening tools and assemble them into a swallow screening protocol that can be administered by nursing staff for triage whether inpatient populations are at risk of unsafe for oral intake. After conducting a systematic review and assessing the quality, we found the Yale Swallow Protocol was identified as a high-quality swallowing screening tool and was used for screening the risk of aspiration across diverse outpatients who were referred for further swallow assessment. However, whether the Yale Swallow Protocol can be implemented in acute care settings to screen for "oral intake" requires further warranted for its applicability. Therefore, this study aims to test the applicability (i.e., accuracy, responsiveness, time-spending, and safety) of the Yale Swallow Protocol when used to screen for 'oral intake,' with speech therapists' evaluations serving as the reference standard for inpatients across various disease categories.

Conditions

Interventions

DIAGNOSTIC_TEST

Yale Swallow Protocol

All the participants will receive the two swallow screenings, i.e., Yale Swallow Protocol and Speech-language therapist, to classify the participants into either "try swallow" or "NPO" status.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • National Taiwan University Hospital

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Cheryl Chia-Hui Chen, DNSc · National Taiwan University

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2024-02-19
Primary Completion
2024-09-06
Completion
2024-09-06

Countries

  • Taiwan

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT06171165 on ClinicalTrials.gov