President's Message
Dr Simon Gabe, BAPEN President
Welcome to your ‘new look, new format’ In Touch!
As I am sure you are well aware over the past year we have been giving a lot of thought as to the best way to keep all our members up-to-date with BAPEN information and news – because there is always so much! We continue to update and improve our website and we also have the weekly Wednesday bulletin that alerts you to all new information posted on the site. But, a really valuable membership communications tool is In Touch. At the end of 2016, we carried out a survey to gather your thoughts on In Touch in terms of format and content, along with some general questions about how you prefer to access information. We also asked those of you that visited the 2016 BAPEN Conference whether you would prefer to receive In Touch digitally or in printed format. Not surprisingly, the majority of members that responded to the In Touch survey, and the questions posed at conference, voted in favour of receiving In Touch in a digital format.
As an association, we are dedicated to meeting the information needs of you, our members, and we have been working hard on your ‘new look, new format’ In Touch over the last few months. We hope that you find the digital version of In Touch easy to navigate and full of useful information. The new format also ensures that you can access and read on the go! However, we are always open to making further improvements and welcome any feedback you may have, so please don’t hesitate to email your thoughts to: communications@bapen.org.uk.
As ever, there is lots of activity going on ‘behind the scenes’ at BAPEN that we will be able to update you on in detail in due course, however, in the meantime, here are some tasters.
BAPEN 5-year Vision and Strategy
The time has come again to look ahead and plan for the next 5 years. This is always an important exercise if BAPEN is going to continue to be a vital association that can respond to current needs and drive changes and improvements in the healthcare system in relation to nutrition and hydration care. At our upcoming ‘Think Tank’ meeting in June, we will be holding an interactive workshop session to discuss BAPEN’s vision and strategy for the coming 5 years. Following this meeting, we will circulate the draft strategy document for you, as members, to comment on. The final strategy will be launched at the BAPEN Annual Conference in Birmingham (21-22 November 2017). We look forward to sharing this and consulting with you over the summer months.
The General Election
There are a number of key meetings with external stakeholders, such as the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Patient Safety and the Malnutrition Task Force/NHS England that have been postponed for a few weeks until after the snap General Election on June 8th. However, we look forward to updating you on these in our next issue of In Touch.
Strengthening relationships
We have been busy strengthening relationships and building closer ties with like-minded organisations over the past few months, with a view to working more closely together to collaborate on projects and campaigns deemed to be of mutual benefit. A Memorandum of Understanding has just been finalised with the British Dietetic Association (BDA), which will enhance co-operation and co-ordination between BAPEN and the BDA, both through PENG and the BDA as a whole. Promotion of the partnership, working together to produce resources of professional relevance and providing mutual support for initiatives will be at the core of this relationship and we look forward to reporting more to you over the coming months.
In addition, talks with The Nutrition Society regarding reforming links with this organisation have been very positive. We welcome the opportunity to work alongside Bernadette Moore, Council Member at the The Nutrition Society, which will enable us to start to address obesity in a meaningful way. Again, watch this space!
The BAPEN Nutritional Care Tool
As you all know, BAPEN launched its web-based Nutritional Care Tool in 2015, which enables organisations to monitor nutritional screening, the effectiveness of nutritional care that they provide and patient experience. We appreciate that the complexities of delivering good nutritional care make measurement fraught with difficulty. However, we believe that measurement is key to delivering further improvements in the quality of nutritional care and the Tool was developed to do just that by utilising quality improvement methodology (i.e. these data are intended to identify improvement opportunities within an organisation, not performance management or research). As a reminder, the tool includes:
- Process measures – screening and care planning
- Outcome measures – weight loss (trackable over time for the duration of admission)
- Patient experience measures of nutritional care received.
The BAPEN Nutritional Care Tool overview:
- The Tool is free to all NHS and social care organisations
- Completion takes approximately 5 minutes per individual
- The data are instantly available to frontline teams to deliver improvement
- Improvements in nutritional care can be delivered whilst the patient is still in your care
- The Tool is completely voluntary so it is up to you how frequently you use it and the scale of use.
To encourage use, we have run four separate national data collection weeks each year since launch, mirroring the approach we took in the national screening weeks. This does make it easier for some organisations (care homes or hospitals), who feel unable to commit to ongoing use, to use the Tool and get valuable data on their nutritional provision and benchmark their own improvements. The next data collection week commences 12th June 2017 and we encourage as many of you as possible to participate.
Click here to find out more about the BAPEN Nutritional Care Tool and register to use the tool.
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