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Belgian BRIDGE-CRIT project wins the 2026 MNI Grant to bridge nutritional care from hospital to home after critical illness

Berlin, Germany – [September 2026] – The Medical Nutrition International Industry (MNI) is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2026 MNI Grant is the Belgian project BRIDGE-CRIT – Building Recovery through Integrated Discharge Guidelines and Education after Critical Illness. Led by pharmacist and PhD researcher Oona Leemans, the project will receive €40,000 to support the development and implementation of a standardized nutrition-focused discharge and follow-up pathway for intensive care unit (ICU) survivors.

“For patients that suffered from severe sepsis, trauma or prolonged mechanical ventilation, leaving the hospital is not the end of their recovery journey,” explains Oona Leemans: “Critical illness can leave patients with significant muscle loss and weakness, while their nutritional needs remain high as they work to regain strength and independence. Yet once they return home, nutritional support can become less consistent, leaving patients and healthcare professionals without the same level of guidance and follow-up available in hospital. BRIDGE-CRIT was born from the need to build a standardized bridge across that gap.”

The project brings together two Belgian hospitals from different linguistic communities – UZ Brussel and Erasme Hospital – to develop a common approach to nutritional care after critical illness: “By connecting hospitals across language barriers and extending nutritional care beyond discharge, BRIDGE-CRIT aims to provide patients with more consistent support throughout recovery and create a model that can easily be adapted to other healthcare settings across Europe.” continues Leemans.

“BRIDGE-CRIT stood out to MNI because it combines a very practical approach with strong potential for wider implementation. The project is designed to fit into everyday clinical practice, while its multilingual and low-burden approach makes it adaptable to different healthcare settings and countries. These were important considerations for the MNI and ESPEN evaluators,” stated Elena Miceli, MNI Executive Director.

At the centre of the project is a practical “Discharge Bundle”, bringing together patient information and videos in different languages, culturally adapted food advice, guidance on oral nutritional supplements and tube feeding, and decision-support tools for healthcare professionals. This will be combined with a discharge consultation and structured telehealth follow-up at three weeks and three months after discharge.

For Leemans, the ambition is to create a lasting change in clinical practice: “We are not just doing observational research, we are building a permanent clinical infrastructure and backing it up with health economics to prove it is scalable and sustainable for hospitals.”

The 2026 MNI Grant attracted 34 applications from 17 countries, reflecting the growing interest in practical approaches to improving clinical nutrition. Alongside the winning BRIDGE-CRIT project, MNI acknowledged two other outstanding projects: PallNutri Connect: A Digital Bidirectional Nutritional Care Platform for Palliative Patients project from Latvia, and Empowering nurses through nutrition education in cancer care: The ENTICE project from Greece.

Stay tuned for the 2027 MNI Grant criteria   The 2027 call will be announced at https://www.medicalnutritionindustry.org/grant/

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For further details regarding the additional eligible applications received, please see below:

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