Food, Dining and Nutrition resources (providers)
The Commission’s new Food, Dining and Nutrition resources aim to support high-quality, enjoyable food and dining experiences for aged care residents.
The resources will help to build the capability of your staff, and you as a provider, to identify and act early on areas that impact eating and nutrition. They will enable you and your staff to understand why it is so important to the health, wellbeing and quality of life of your residents. They will empower residents to know what they can expect from their food and dining experience, influence changes where needed and resolve issues.
Resources
The Commission set up a Food and Nutrition Expert Advisory Group. The Group brings together wide-ranging expertise in the areas of consumer advocacy; cultural and linguistic diversity; nutrition; food preparation and service; speech pathology; dementia care; nursing and wound care; and dental and oral health. They identified 4 priority areas.
In 2021, the Commission engaged Health Outcomes International (HOI) Group to analyse consumer complaints to the Commission about food and dining in residential aged care from 2018, 2019 and 2020. This report clearly identified the same broad priority areas.
Separate provider, aged care staff and consumer resources have been created based on the priority areas. The Expert Advisory Group was key to developing these resources, including testing draft versions with providers and consumers in a series of focus groups.
There will be a total of 4 suites, each containing 6-9 resources, to be released in 2022. They will cover the following topics:
- Dining
- Choice
- Swallowing
- Oral Health.
The Dining resources are now available for download.
Please ensure you provide staff and residents with access to these resources and promote them widely.
Provider and aged care staff
Download the:
- Dining in residential aged care - tips and tricks fact sheet
- Know, Observe, Support, Act poster
- 8 facts you need to know about each resident poster
- Getting the dining experience right aged care staff fact sheet
- Getting the dining experience right provider fact sheet
- Getting the dining experience right poster
- Dining and consumer choice goal planning tool
Consumer
Download the:
- Enjoying dining consumer fact sheet
- Food and dining preferences sheet
- Your dining experience consumer poster
The Choice, Swallowing and Oral Health resources will be released late 2022.
The resources will be supported by the release of Aged Care Learning Information Solution (Alis) modules and short videos throughout late 2022 and early 2023.
Webinars
A series of webinars is being held to support providers to deliver high-quality food and dining experiences.
The first webinar in the food, dining and nutrition series focused on the dining experience and consumer choice. The recording of this session is available.
The second webinar, planned for Thursday 17 November 2022 will cover measures of good practice.
Webinars 3 and 4 will be held in early 2023 and will cover swallowing issues and oral health.
Feedback
We would welcome hearing positive stories and case studies from you, and would like creative constructive suggestions on how we can further improve food, nutrition and dining in aged care.
We are interested to know how you have brought about effective change. Please send through your stories, case studies and ideas to info@agedcarequality.gov.au. This, with feedback from the webinars, will inform further engagement and education activities for the broader sector.