To investigate the current status of Clinical Nutrition Department (CND) in Jiangsu, evaluate its construction in tertiary hospitals and offer valuable suggestions on its further development. Subjects: 49 CND of the tertiary hospitals in Jiangsu Province.

An online questionnaire was designed for 62 tertiary hospitals in Jiangsu Province with random sampling methods, which contains 5 aspects: department setting, staffing, hardware facilities, medical treatment, education, and scientific research. 49 effective questionnaires were collected with a response rate of 79.03%.

Different hospitals had different categories for CND, while their professionals were much less than the standard requirement of 1:200 for the tertiary hospitals in Jiangsu (σ=0.00158, s²=0.000003). From the perspective of hardware facilities and medical work, most of the subjects only received limited resources. This restricted the construction of CND, which was not yet in line with the hospital's support for the other clinical departments.

It is clarified that CND has certain problems in various aspects: vague department definition, insufficient professional staffs, resource constraints and limited clinical ability. As a result, the current management and development of CND are still confusing. It is necessary for the health authorities, hospital administrators and departments themselves to work together to improve the current status.