Meal Support Guidelines for Patients

Overview

Your treatment team require that your meals be supported and supervised to help you complete all food, fluid, and supplements prescribed as part of the nutrition management plan.

The following are the hospital’s meal support guidelines:

1. Your meal plan:

• The Dietitian has specifically tailored your meal plan to meet your requirements for health.

• To ensure that we can monitor whether the meal plan is meeting your requirements we request that no food outside of your meal plan is consumed. This means no food from vending machines, from home, or additional food and drinks from nursing staff.

• No food should be kept in your room. All meal trays should be removed after mealtimes.

2. Eating Environment:

• Try to create a calm and uninterrupted environment for mealtimes. This may involve closing your door or drawing the privacy curtains, playing some calming music, or putting the TV on in the background.

• Clear a space in your room for your meals. Try to keep this area free of objects which may encourage you to engage in disordered behaviours.

3. Time:

• You will be given 30 minutes to complete all main meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and 20 minutes to complete all snacks.

• It is expected that you would have completed your meal or snack within this allocated time.

4. Bathroom:

• There will be no bathroom access during mealtimes, so please remember to use the bathroom before the mealtime commences.

• All bathroom visits will be supervised within 1 hour of the main meal or 30 minutes of the snack time finishing. During this time if you need to visit the bathroom you will be asked to keep the bathroom door ajar a few inches and may be asked to count, talk, or sing whilst using the bathroom.

5. Eating Behaviours:

• You are encouraged to refrain from engaging in any disordered behaviours before, during, and after mealtimes.

• This means the expectation is that you engage in normalised eating behaviours at mealtimes such as taking appropriate sized mouthfuls of food, not cutting food into small pieces or pulling or picking food apart, eating at a reasonable pace, etc.

• This also includes eating the food that is provided without trying to minimise food intake, such as by hiding food

6. Negotiations:

• Meals and snacks are to be eaten as they are provided. Only the Dietitian can make amendments to your meal plan in discussion with the team, so please do not engage in negotiating with the meal supporter to make changes to your meals or snacks

• Any changes that you would like to be made needs to be directed to the Dietitian outside of the mealtime

7. Post Meal Supervision

• After meals and snacks you will be required to rest for 1 hour after main meals and 30 minutes after snacks.

• During this time visits to the bathroom will be supervised.

Tips for Meal Times

It can be useful to engage in something distracting during and after meal times to help alleviate the anxiety and distress of eating the provided meals and snacks. It may take some time to experiment with what helps you, but you may like to try watching TV, playing a board game (i.e. monopoly, scrabble, a puzzle), playing a card game (i.e. Uno, solitaire), colouring in using a colouring in book, doing a crossword, Sudoku, journalling, or taking up knitting or crocheting.

It may also be helpful to reach out to family and friends to talk, and also remember that the meal supporter is there to provide you with support and encouragement, so you can lean on them for the support you need.