Patient Feeding In Hospital

The writer would consider the timing of meal times and patient feeding in hospitals to be major issues that needs to be addressed. Regarding the timing of meals be an issue for many reasons such as the disturbances made to patients routine meaning that when patients are at home they may be set times that their more used to eating compared to the times in which meals are given in hospitals resulting in reduced intake because the patient is not Hungary at that time, the timing of staff break times are also an issue as they seem to take place at the same times as patient meal times this reduces the number of staff on the ward available to assist patient with eating, the last issue around meal that the writer feels needs to be taken into consideration

When it comes to feeding a patient all members of staff should be engaging in hand hygiene and giving the patient an opportunity even if they are bed bound bring them a basin of water to wash their hands as they could have always be used to doing so throughout their life’s. In many hospitals it appears to be the care assistant that assists the patient with feeding and in the writer opinion it should be the nurse as the nurse has more knowledge and is more educated around the dangers of feeding patients with swallow difficulties such as aspiration pneumonia. An issue when feeding patients meals is that many people have the tendency to mix all the food together for the patient, they do not take into account that patients may not like the food this way or they may be prefer to eat certain foods first for example eating meat for the potatoes and

The writer is going to discuss the ‘MUST’ (Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool) and the ‘MNA’ (Mini Nutritional Assessment) tools. In the writer’s own experience the most commonly used nutritional screening tool is the ‘MUST’ screening tool. This is used to detect those that are malnourished, at risk of becoming malnourished and those who are obese. It consists of five steps, measuring the patients weight and height to achieve their BMI (Body Mass Index) score, gathering the percentage of unexplained weight loss using the table provided, it looks at acute diseases present, step four involves adding the scores of the first three steps together to receive the patients overall risk of malnutrition and finally step 5 involves the use of guidelines and local policies to develop a plan of care