Suzanne W. McNutt, MS, RD, Beth A. Rabinovich, PhD, and Robert C. Ficke, MA. Westat, 3949 E. Viewcrest Drive, Salt Lake City, UT 84124, 801-453-9268, susiemcnutt@westat.com

The Performance Outcomes Measures project (POMP), sponsored by the Administration on Aging (AoA), is an effort to develop and field-test a core set of performance measures for state and community programs on aging operating under the Older Americans Act (OAA). Nutritional services are a major component of the OAA. The POMP project developed the Nutritional Risk or ‘NR’ Survey to monitor the effectiveness of the congregate and home delivered meals programs. The NR Survey is designed to examine the impact of nutritional services on the target population. It is a modification and expansion of the Nutrition Checklist developed by the Nutrition Screening Initiative. The Nutrition Checklist was developed as a self-administered tool to evaluate an individual for nutritional risk. The U.S. government mandates that the Nutrition Checklist be administered to all participants in the program. Changes were made to collect more detail about the diet and health of the participants, including reformatting the statements as questions, dividing the statements into multiple items, adding serving responses, and enhancing the questionnaire with additional questions. A new scoring system was developed to measure dietary adequacy. An adequacy score was assigned to each food group question based on the minimum recommended servings for older adults from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Guide Pyramid, published with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2000. The new scoring system will be discussed and results presented on the percentage of home delivered and congregate meal participants in the POMP project that met these guidelines.

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