What is it about?
Dysphagia is the medical term for a range of difficulties associated with swallowing foods, fluids, and saliva, which can lead to malnutrition, dehydration, increased length of hospital stay, aspiration pneumonia, and potentially death. Dysphagia can be managed through modifying foods and fluids to make swallowing safer and to optimise nutrition and hydration.
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Why is it important?
This article highlights the different options available to manage dysphagia and identifies strategies to help ensure patients receive the nutritional care they need. Alternative routes of nutrition and fluids can include tube feeding, risk-acknowledged feeding and comfort feeding. The suitability and appropriateness of these options should be considered especially for those who are receiving palliative care or end-of-life management.
Perspectives
We hope this article is useful to those working with and to those suffering with dysphagia and highlights the options available to help ensure patients with dysphagia can eat and drink safely, and with dignity. It is also hoped that more consideration is given to alternative feeding strategies, such as risk-acknowledged feeding, which should be discussed within the multi-disciplinary team with the patient and their families/carers/support network.
Robert Davies
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The use of modified foods and fluids in the management of dysphagia, British Journal of Neuroscience Nursing, October 2017, Mark Allen Group,
DOI: 10.12968/bjnn.2017.13.sup5.s4.
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