“Nutrition Matters” News

Easy Ideas for Fortifying Your Aged Care Menu

How well do you think your current menu is able to provide adequate nutrition and hydration? Particularly for those clients with poor appetites and who eat only small meals?
Increasing energy and protein content of meals, also known as food fortification, can improve nutrition without increasing the amount of food. This can assist with maintaining weight while providing opportunity for greater nutritional intake for elderly clients with poor appetites. Some of our facilities have reported improved weights and less money spent on nutritional supplements by making simple fortifications to their menu. Read more »

Nutrition Management & Unannounced Agency Visits

Nutrition Matters Newsletter June 2019
Be Confident in your Nutrition Management with an Unannounced Agency Visit.
We are now almost 12 months down the track after the change to unannounced visits, and nutrition continues to be a strong focus of many accreditation visits.
Nutrition management within an aged care home covers a wide range of areas and involves all staff. It can be daunting to figure out where to start in reviewing your nutrition management. Below we outline a few key areas that are crucial to ensuring your home is providing high quality nutrition & Read more »

New Resident with Tube Feeding… Here are Some Tips

Enteral Feeding

We get many questions from our aged care homes on how to prepare for a new resident with a tube feed. So, we’ve come up with a check list of all the things that need to be considered, for a smooth admission for your home and your resident.
First step is to get all the background information
The Type of Tube
Is it a PEG, PEJ, NG?
Most tubes that come into aged care homes are PEG or gastrostomy tubes (meaning they are placed to allow feed to go directly into the stomach).  Read more »

Dignity of Choice in Diet: New Quality Standards – Will this affect your menu?

The new Aged care quality standards are to be implemented and assessed against from the 1st July, 2019, and Standard One is all about ensuring your consumers are able to exercise choice.  It’s a good time to question how you will manage choice especially in regard to meal choice. The agency focus will be to ask your residents questions and then depending on their responses, require your home to provide supporting evidence.
Choice – The consumer’s right to make informed choices, Read more »

National Quality Indicators: Now Compulsory

BMI

How do you match up on your management of unplanned weight loss?
The National Aged Care Quality Indicator (NQI) program, which until now has been voluntary for most aged care providers, is becoming compulsory program commencing 1 July 2019.   This issue of Nutrition Matters gives you a few pointers on managing this new requirement.
The required data on unplanned weight loss is the number of residents with
– Loss of 3 kg or more in a month
– Read more »

Creating a Culturally Specific Menu

When we think about culture, food is often one of the first things that comes to mind. The role food plays and the experiences residents have with food goes well beyond providing nourishment alone.
The cultural diversity within residential aged care facilities (RACF) is growing. With such diversity it can be difficult to provide a menu and an eating environment which replicates the foods and atmosphere each resident is accustomed to.
Peter Thiveos, Hospitality Manager at Fronditha Care has given us some great insight on how they do it in their homes across Victoria and NSW. Read more »

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