President's Message
Dr Trevor Smith, BAPEN President
As the seasons slowly change, and the country creeps out of its period of isolation, BAPEN will be shifting focus outwards too. We are gradually approaching our Annual Conference, which while it can’t be a live event in Brighton as planned, does look set to be a very exciting virtual experience! Please mark 9th – 19th November in your diaries and check out the information on the BAPEN Conference page in this edition of In Touch to find out more about our unmissable webinars!
I’ve been overwhelmed to hear about all of the ways nutrition teams have made changes to their services this year. To formally commend everything you’ve been doing, we have hosted a COVID-19 Improvement and Innovation Award. Submissions were open throughout July and August to nutrition support teams across the country. We will be sharing the results of those awards soon.
UK Malnutrition Awareness Week 2020 (UK MAW 2020), the third of its kind, is now less than one month away! We know that some of the fantastic local events we usually see will be difficult to pull off this year with the current restrictions. We hope many of you will be able to stage local awareness raising activities, but all UK MAW 2020 materials are easy to access online, making them straightforward to share on websites and social media.
Do note that our hashtag has changed from #MAW2020 to #UKMAW2020. It may seem a small change, but it reflects the fact that malnutrition campaigning has gone global! In North America, ASPEN is hosting its own awareness week at the same time this year, and new awareness weeks are springing up in other countries, no doubt inspired by our success. You can join the global conversation with #MAW2020 or find conversations on home shores by using #UKMAW2020.
The importance of UK Malnutrition Awareness Week, especially at this time, does bear repeating. The pressures created by lockdown may have made accessing good and plentiful food more difficult for some of the most vulnerable members of our community. Many lunch clubs and other valuable services have been temporarily halted. In addition, an ambient message that losing weight reduces coronavirus morbidity has possibly confused some to whom the advice should not apply.
Resources are already available on our website for you to share with your patients and teams. In October, expect media coverage, infographics, virtual events and even an Instagram account!
The week will be a brilliant opportunity to promote our ‘Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool’ (‘MUST’). We also hope to raise awareness of our self-screening tool and also to help signpost people to the resources available through the Malnutrition Task Force. I encourage you to use UK MAW 2020 as an opportunity to talk widely about screening, to share your knowledge and help others understand why this matters so much. It also offers an opportunity to talk about nutrition support, and the needs of patients who receive enteral and parenteral nutrition, the other side of the malnutrition story.
I also hope you will all take part in our national survey of malnutrition and nutritional care that is running throughout October, coordinated by the Malnutrition Action Group. Our aim is to get as many people and organisations across the whole of the UK to participate in this mass screening exercise during UK Malnutrition Week itself but also across the rest of the month. All we want you to do is to select a day and screen all the patients you see on that day. By screening a large number of people across the UK, we can build a better picture of realities of care. Please do check this out on our website today!
I hope many of you had a chance to catch up with PINNT’s 2020 Home Artificial Nutrition (HAN) Week last month. The week was a huge success, and that’s no mean feat in the circumstances where all the planned events had to be adapted and ‘made virtual’ to keep everybody safe.
I am encouraged that HAN Week reached out beyond the nutrition community to help members of the public recognise the challenges faced by people who rely on home artificial nutrition. The stories shared in the media and on social media were very compelling and helped bring to life how valuable PINNT’s support is and what a supportive network it provides. HAN Week is run by PINNT volunteers of course, and is no doubt enormous hard work, I am a huge admirer of all they do.
One of my colleagues within BAPEN recently described PINNT as ‘the beating heart of BAPEN’ and I wholeheartedly agree. If you are a member of BAPEN but less than familiar with the work of PINNT I urge you to find out more and show them your support.
Last but not least, I have some additional BAPEN news to share with you. I can announce the appointment of three new BAPEN Trustees, who bring a wealth of charity and industry experience and expertise to help guide BAPEN through the years ahead. The initial focus of our work with the new Trustees will be directed to delivering our strategy – this is something that we hope all BAPEN members will feel a part of. We will share more information on the Trustee appointments soon, so do keep an eye on our website for updates on this, as well as on plans for some exciting ‘virtual’ events that we have scheduled in lieu of our usual Annual Conference.
I hope that you, your families and you patients are finding ways to get through each day as safely and kindly as possible. As ever, it is a pleasure to preside over such a brilliant group of professionals.
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