The toolkit provides ten nutritional guidelines focusing on food, service and environment and will be rolled out to over 60 care homes and hospitals throughout the business.
Steve Cenci, managing director of healthcare at Compass Group UK & Ireland, said: “Managing the nutritional intake of individuals living with dementia is an essential part of their care.
“Our pilot schemes demonstrated the benefits of understanding more about the patient’s past, as well as their current condition, in order to provide them with a food offer they wanted and ultimately would eat.
“We are looking forward to rolling out the toolkit to enable our team to provide exceptional nutritional care for each individual patient and resident living with dementia.”
As part of the pilot scheme, catering and care was provided at two sites with joint training in dementia awareness being provided by Alzheimer’s Society UK.
Activities included:
- Food Passport: Compass Healthcare colleagues worked with friends and relatives of residents to build up a clear picture of each person’s daily eating preferences and routines in relation to meal times before they had dementia, resulting in the creation of an individualised nutritional care plan for each resident.’
- Food Service Journey: The creation of a system which is used to process map the journey of a meal from the time the meal is prepared to the time it is served. This encourages the catering team to be flexible in serving food when the resident requires it.
- DMAT (Dementia Mealtime Assessment Tool): A checklist carried out by the chef manager to identify common behavioural eating difficulties during mealtimes, Information gathered was then used to generate suggestions on how eating difficulties can be overcome, so residents are able to eat independently for as long as possible.
Launched to coincide with National Dementia Awareness Week (May 15-21st) the initiative is based on research that finds that by 2050 approximately 135 million people will be living with dementia.
In addition to the Dignified Dining toolkit, the Compass Healthcare team is also fundraising for research into dysphagia (difficulties in swallowing) and has already raised £50,000.