Background

In 2021, we began a quality improvement initiative to assess the effectiveness of our preoperative nutrition education. The program's registered dietitians created a 27-question nutrition quiz which we give all patients at their initial visit prior to any nutrition education. Patients are not given a copy of the quiz or the correct answers. Patients take the identical quiz at the completion of their preoperative nutrition education. We hypothesized that improvement in quiz scores was consistent with effective education. We found that patient quiz scores improved over the 3-6 dietitian visits. We analyzed if scoring above average on the post-education quiz correlated with improvement in postoperative follow-up.All bariatric surgery patients completed the nutrition quiz prior to seeing the dietitian for their initial preoperative appointment. Patients seeking a revision were excluded. The average score on the quiz prior to seeing a dietitian was 76.2%. The average post-education quiz score was 85.7%. 88 patients completed both pre-education and post-education nutrition quizzes and are one year from their bariatric surgery. 74.5% of patients that scored above average on their post-education nutrition quiz attended their one year postoperative follow-up appointment. Only 40.5% of patients scoring below average on their post-education nutrition quiz came to their one year postoperative follow-up.We found that a higher score on the post-education nutrition quiz correlated with better follow up at one year post-operation. This may reflect more engagement in or commitment to the program from those patients that benefited the most from the preoperative nutrition education process.