Counseling skills identified by practitioner dietitians as required for entry into diverse dietetic practice

Abstract

The professional dietitian functions as educator and counselor to the general public and peer professionals. The pressures of decreasing revenues, malpractice, and an increasingly technical nutrition field has resulted in increased awareness of the importance of highly skilled dietitian counselors. Training dietitians to meet these needs resulted in American Dietetic Association (ADA) mandated changes in training curriculum. The updated mandates to Plan IV, current ADA curriculum, required counseling training, with little direction as to execution of training or the type of skills deemed needed by practitioner dietitians. The purpose of the research was to identify counseling skills needed by dietitians, as required in the Plan IV college preparatory curriculum of the American Dietetic Association. Two hundred fifty practicing dietitians were surveyed by mail for agreement and training designation on ten identified counseling skills. Of the total 250 surveys mailed to the respondents, 198 usable surveys were returned, a return rate of 79.2%. Data analysis included descriptive analysis in consultation with a statistician. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze the data and to generate descriptive statistics in the form of frequency tables. There was general agreement with skills statements by the respondents surveyed. Correlational magnitude derived cannot be considered large due to the fact that strengths of the relationships were not great. A summary of total responses is offered. It was concluded by the researcher that the skills identified as most valuable to dietitians for entry into the world of work practice are deemed most desirable for training prior to job placement. Those identified as least desirable are deemed to be best acquired after job entry, and less important to dietitian counselor success.