نبذة مختصرة : This article belongs to the Special Issue Nutrition-Based Interventions for Neuropsychiatric Diseases in Children. ; Background: Nutritional status assessment (NSA) can be challenging in children with cerebral palsy (CP). There are high omission rates in national surveillance reports of weight and height information. Alternative methods are used to assess nutritional status that may be unknown to the healthcare professionals (HCP) who report these children. Caregivers experience challenges when dealing with feeding problems (FP) common in CP. Our aim was to assess the difficulties in NSA which are causing this underreport and to create solutions for registers and caregivers. Methods: An online questionnaire was created for registers. Three meetings with HCP and caregivers were held to discuss problems and solutions regarding NSA and intervention. Results: HCP mentioned difficulty in NSA due to a lack of time, collaboration with others, equipment, and childrens' motor impairment. Caregivers experienced difficulty in preparing nutritious meals with adapted textures. The creation of educational tools and other strategies were suggested. A toolkit for HCP was created with the weight and height assessment methods described and other for caregivers to deal with common FP. Conclusions: There are several difficulties experienced by HCP that might be overcome with educational tools, such as a toolkit. This will facilitate nutritional assessment and intervention and hopefully reduce underreporting. ; This study was part of the MSc thesis in clinical nutrition of one of the authors (C.P.), which was supervised by other authors (supervisor A.C.M and co-supervisor R.B.), from Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon and Lisbon School of Health Technology, Lisbon, Portugal. The H&TRC author gratefully acknowledges the FCT/MCTES national support through UIDB/05608/2020 and UIDP/05608/2020. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
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