course

Dining with Dignity
Essential guide to nutrition for the older person

This course has been designed to demonstrate how and ideal care home provides well balanced, nutritionally healthy meals whilst at the same time, improving the 'Mealtime Experience' for their residents. Good nutrition and wellbeing is not just about preparing good food, it is about the whole eating experience.

"For many residents, mealtimes are the highlight of the day."

Course summary - 3 steps to Dining with Dignity

Step 1 - Understanding food and nutrition

This opening phase deals with understanding food, healthy eating and the nutritional guidelines for an older person and includes how to recognise and treat the signs of nutritional deficiencies and malnutrition.

Step 2 - Maintaining dignity, respect and independence

This section deals with the mealtime experience of the resident, and how you can help to maintain their dignity, respect and independence. It examines the physical and psychological issues a resident may face and how you can help overcome these. It then moves into understanding the needs of residents with dementia.

Step 3 – Nutritional planning

These section concentrates on the role of carer or chef who is more actively involved in the meal preparation and includes:

Special Diets
Menu Planning
Menu Patterns and Portion Control
Menu Checking to create a Balanced Menu

Good Practice Examples

There are many great care homes already operating to a high standard and throughout this course you will see Good Practice Examples.

These have been chosen after visiting care homes and observing good practices, and appear throughout the course.

We may well demonstrate examples of good practice that you already have in place. If this is the case, then congratulate yourself.

You perform a great job in situations that can sometimes be very difficult.

This course is about reminding you of the good practices you already have, and possibly suggesting new ideas that will help improve the quality of care for your residents.

We would encourage you to think about the suggestions we make:

Is the suggestion an improvement?
What practice can be changed?
How can it be changed for the better?
Is there a practice that needs challenging?
How will the residents benefit?

We appreciate this can sometimes be difficult, however, if you can challenge an established attitude and that results in a positive change for the residents; then you have succeeded in making a change for the better.

Good Practice Exercises

These are designed to allow you a glimpse of what a resident may encounter when trying to eat.

What do we do well?

In certain sections, we encourage you to take a few minutes and against key points, write down your own thoughts on what you do well and also areas that you feel could be improved.

What's included?

The Dining with Dignity package includes :

3 hour DVD filmed on location in various care homes
12 month access to all on-line content & downloadable information
12 month access to our recipe database

Available June 2009

This course is in the final stages of development and testing and should be fully available from June 2009. More information incl advance orders please contact Nick Eastwood at East GB Ltd.

The Safer Food System including Dining with dignity are developed by East GB Ltd supported by eLearning experts Tribal Media Ltd and are copyright.