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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Improving food intake in nursing home residents with feeding assistance
— a staffing analysis | | Author(s) | Sandra F Simmons, Dan Osterweil, John F Schnelle |
| Journal title | Journals of Gerontology: Series A, Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, vol 56A, no 12, December 2001 |
| Pages | pp M790-M799 |
| Keywords | Nutrition ; Patients [nursing homes] ; Personnel ; Evaluation ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | Recommendations have been made to increase the number of nursing home staff available to provide feeding assistance during mealtimes. There are no specific data related to two critical variables necessary to estimate mealtime staffing needs: how many residents are responsive to feeding assistance; and how much staff time is required to provide feeding assistance to these residents? The purpose of this study was to collect preliminary data relevant to these two issues. 74 resident in three nursing homes received a 2-day, or six-meal, trial of one-to-one feeding assistance. Total percentage of food and fluid consumed during mealtimes was estimated across 3 days during usual care and 2 days during the intervention. The amount of time that staff spent providing assistance and type of assistance was measured under each condition. Results showed that 50% of the participants significantly increased their oral food and fluid intake during mealtime. The intervention required significantly more staff time to implement (average of 38 minutes per resident/meal vs 9 minutes rendered by staff). The time required to implement the feeding assistance intervention greatly exceeded the time the nursing staff spent assisting residents in usual mealtime care conditions. These data suggest that it will almost certainly be necessary to both increase staffing levels and to organize staff better to produce higher quality feeding assistance during mealtimes. (KJ). |
| Accession Number | CPA-020121214 A |
| Classmark | CF: LHB:LF: QM: 4C: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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