Mealtime management and dysphagia plans

Read a participant’s mealtime plan, record meals and swallowing concerns, and escalate choking straight away.

Before you begin

• Your role can view health records; recording needs permission to record health entries.
• A mealtime plan exists for the person.

Read the mealtime plan

1. Go to Care → Health and high-intensity, choose the participant and open the Mealtime and dysphagia tab.
2. Mealtime plan shows the IDDSI food and IDDSI drinks levels, then Assistance, Positioning, Utensils, Pace, Supervision and Watch for, with the speech pathologist and plan date.
3. In the support worker app, the plan appears on the person’s profile under Alerts and risks and at the top of the Medication screen.

Record a meal or a concern

1. In Record a meal, choose What happened: Meal completed, Coughing, Choking, Refused texture or Texture error.
2. Add Detail (texture, amount eaten, response). Detail is required for choking.
3. Select Save. Choking is escalated straight away and the message says it was recorded and escalated.
4. For choking, also select Log incident to open the incident wizard.

If the airway is blocked, follow first aid and call 000 first. Record afterwards.

Escalate an earlier entry

1. In Mealtime log, find the entry (filter by Event).
2. Select Escalate to send it to the RN on call. A message confirms it.

Watch across people

1. Recent mealtime concerns lists coughing, choking and texture problems across everyone you can see, so a lead can spot patterns.

Tips

• Food and fluid amounts can also be charted on the Food and Fluid charts if those are set up.

If something goes wrong

“… has no mealtime plan” shows instead of a plan.

A mealtime plan is added to the health plan once a speech pathologist has assessed swallowing risk. Ask the clinical lead.

Save is greyed out when recording choking.

Enter Detail for choking events.

Escalate is missing on an entry.

Completed meals and entries already escalated cannot be escalated.