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The Management and Care of Severe Malnutrition: An Interactive Evening Presentation and Discussion

Session Leader: Caroline Tanner (FANTA).

Severe malnutrition affects millions of children and adults worldwide. Severe malnutrition is often thought of as occurring only in the context of emergencies, yet it also occurs in 'development situations.' While substantial advances have been made in the technical management of severe malnutrition, this is often not translated into effective practice.

Considerable challenges remain. In many situations such as the current example of Guatemala, little capacity exists to manage elevated rates of acute malnutrition. This limited capacity is reflected in the very high mortality rates in many hospitals and rehabilitation centers in many developing countries, which has remained unchanged for several decades.

Many severely malnourished are not reached by conventional programs; others suffer recurrent bouts of severe malnutrition because programs are not sustainable.

Most nutritional emergencies are chronic or cyclical in nature. Often they occur in the context of ongoing development programs. Typically the response involves the setting up of centralized, resource intensive curative feeding programs. This model of care is not always suitable to the context, and often not sustainable.

Feeding programs have suffered from high costs, poor coverage, low impact as well as undermining local health infrastructure and disempowering communities.

Caroline Tanner, FANTA Emergency Nutrition Advisor will lead a participatory evening discussion. She will highlight some innovative ongoing pilot approaches to managing severe malnutrition and current attempts to develop links between emergency and development. Available guidelines and their limitations will be discussed. The groups' own experiences will be drawn upon and discussed. References and selected readings will be available.

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Management and Care of Severe Malnutrition: Caroline Tanner (FANTA)

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Caroline Tanner is currently the Emergency Advisor for the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) project at the Academy for Educational Development. She has extensive field experience in health and nutrition in emergencies and has worked for NGOs, and international government and UN agencies. She has also worked in child survival and food aid program design, management, and in an advisory capacity. Key areas of interest include program approaches that link emergency relief and development, and translating technical advances into effective practice.