More babies, children and young people with complex conditions are now surviving, thanks to improvements in care from birth and the neonatal period onwards. The NHS 10 Year Health Plan also aims to move more care from hospital into the community. This means more children are being cared for at home, including many who receive enteral feeding, and who can have as typical a childhood as possible.

This raises an important question: how many dietitians are needed to support these children safely? In 2023, the BDA’s Safer Staffing work set out an approach for evidencing safe staffing levels for dietitians and recommended a focus on paediatric home enteral feeding. The Paediatric Specialist Group and DISC is now building on that work, using the same approach with additional questions specific to paediatric dietetics.

The results will help us produce recommendations on safer staffing levels for dietitians working in paediatric home enteral feeding. They will also provide valuable evidence to support the case for safely staffed services across the UK.

If you work with children who receive enteral feeding at home, please complete the Paediatric Specialist Group Assessing Paediatric Caseload Complexity and Enteral Nutrition Demand survey by 30 November.

The ASCEND project