With Halloween and Guy Fawkes night celebrations now memories, we move quickly on to planning for the season to be jolly and all that the New Year encompasses. But just before we head into the sparkle and lights of festivities, the world of nutrition has the month of November – our moment to help nutrition sparkle!
All nurses have a part to play in a patient's nutrition pathway. Part of our role as nutrition nurses is to help nutrition stay at the heart of nursing and November is the month when we assess, audit and make the all-important action plans to reinvigorate and generate quality improvement plans to generate enthusiasm for the year ahead.
The powerful partnership between the Malnutrition Task Force and BAPEN brought us Malnutrition Awareness Week this month, helping to bring the multidisciplinary team together to illustrate the BAPEN values ‘Listen, Lead, Share and Support’ (BAPEN, 2023):
- Listen: we came together to take the time to listen to our patients and their families, as well as to feed back from teams not only on the hurdles faced in practice but also the successes
- Lead: we lead with the all important but sometimes dreaded audits that are essential to develop taskforces and quality improvement, both locally and nationally, to improve our patients' care pathways and outcomes. In turn, this improves our job satisfaction day to day
- Share: we share good practice and transfer between teams and care areas, remembering that so much of what we do is transferrable and used in different ways to benefit practice and care
- Support: sharing and supporting each other is the key to enabling, enhancing and advancing individual practice and that of teams to ultimately build safe, effective care pathways. This brings us all closer to the BAPEN vision to ensure that every individual receives safe, timely and appropriate nutritional care in every care setting, every day.
‘We all have different titles but essentially our aim – to promote the importance of nutrition – is key to us all’
Whether or not you are attending the BAPEN conference in Edinburgh (28-29 November), the learning and sharing continues. We bring innovative practice within the NHS and other care environments, in partnership with industry and home care. We support working together, with the patient at the heart of all that we do. Weekly multidisciplinary team meetings, teaching, journal clubs, ward nutrition boards etc are great platforms to share, listen and develop practice, with evidence-based practice at the heart.
We recognise that the role of the nutrition nurse is varied. We all have different titles but essentially our aim – to promote the importance of nutrition – is key to us all. Hand in hand with this is promoting our passion to the wider teams to stimulate creative working to enhance patient assessments and care delivery.
November also saw the final National Nurses Nutrition Group (NNNG) Reflect, Restore and Regain clinical supervision meeting for 2023. We have had another wonderful year, providing a safe space to develop strategies to promote wellbeing in practice, using the time to build on quality improvement projects to fulfil both personal and professional goals. Talking and sharing practice are essential, but finding the time and space to do so can be difficult. Thanks to the NNNG we have been able to provide just this to members. With the promise to Listen, Lead, Share and Support we hope to further this programme with a ‘plan, do study and act’ philosophy.
December and January will see a flurry of plans and New Year resolutions for many of us. Small steps move you closer to the marathon: both personal and professional goals need plans and small steps to achieve greatness and avoid injury. Many of us will never run a marathon, but we will offer encouragement and support to those who do.
We send best wishes for the festive season and for 2024!