A new fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s will provide training in an important but often neglected area of expertise: clinical nutrition.

The one-year Pediatric Advanced Nutrition Fellowship is available to physicians who have completed fellowship training in gastroenterology, endocrinology or cardiology, and to general practitioners with an interest in clinical nutrition science. The program’s first fellow, Stephanie Bachi Oliveira, MD, completed her GI fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s in 2016.

“As medicine becomes more complex, medical schools and residency programs are devoting more time to teaching about disease processes and less about clinical nutrition,” says fellowship program director Conrad Cole, MD, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Cincinnati Children’s. “Ironically, nutritional therapy can lead to better outcomes for many complex diseases. This fellowship will help physicians understand the science behind nutrition and apply that knowledge to patient care, the coordination of interdisciplinary nutrition programs and even areas such as public health.”

The fellowship is one of four offered by the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition — others include pediatric gastroenterology, advanced transplant hepatology and motility. It includes approximately 1,000 hours of mentored clinical experience, plus formal instruction, research opportunities and teaching responsibilities. Fellows will develop clinical nutrition expertise in the evaluation, management and prevention of disorders such as intestinal failure, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, developmental feeding disorders, diabetes mellitus, immunological diseases and renal disorders, to name a few.

Cole says he expects the advanced clinical nutrition fellowship to have a positive effect on the patient experience at Cincinnati Children’s. “Nutrition therapy is already integral to patient care across all divisions at our hospital, but we are always looking for ways to improve care,” Cole says. “We hope that as our fellows interact with specialists in different programs, they will find new ways to utilize nutritional therapy to enhance patient outcomes.”