Are you reading this while sipping a cup of coffee, enjoying a biscuit or two? These seemingly basic, everyday pleasures are not to be taken for granted.
Welcome to Swallowing Awareness Day held on Wednesday 16th March 2022, midway through NHS Nutrition and Hydration Week (14 – 20 March 2022). This is a blog that began two years ago, before Covid-19 suspended 2020’s Swallowing Awareness events. That year Dumfries & Galloway’s Speech and Language Therapy team (Adult Service) had marked the week with personal challenges, which are still relevant to share with you today.
A large part of the role of speech and language therapy (SLT) is to help people living with eating, drinking and swallowing difficulties. The medical term for swallowing difficulties is dysphagia. People may present with symptoms including:
- Difficulty chewing or moving the food or drink around in the mouth
- Food getting stuck in the throat
- Changes in eating habits, eating or drinking slowly or avoiding certain foods
- Coughing or choking when they eat or drink
- Recurrent chest infections or pneumonia (termed an aspiration pneumonia if due to food or drink entering the lungs and becoming infected)
These difficulties may be due to muscle weakness, altered sensation or coordination of the swallow. This can happen in medical conditions such as stroke, brain injury, head and neck cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Motor neurone disease, frailty and dementia.
People, and their carers, may report fear of choking, how much they miss their favourite food and drink or how it’s changed their enjoyment of eating and drinking. It can also impact socially; less likely to go out for meals or eat and drink with others.
SLT aims to enable people to continue eating and drinking as near normal a diet of their choice as they can, balancing risk factors and quality of life. To help manage dysphagia and to reduce the risks of choking or aspiration pneumonia, speech and language therapists may recommend long term use of:
- swallowing strategies (including changing pace or size of mouthfuls)
- altering head position when swallowing
- modifying the texture of food and drinks (including adding sauce, chopping, mincing or pureeing food and thickening drinks)
- using different utensils (alternative cup, special straw)
The challenge : to Practise what we Preach
In the week leading up to Swallowing Awareness Day in March 2020, each member of the SLT (Adult Service) team chose to follow some of the advice we would give to people with a swallowing difficulty. We decided there was nothing better than practising what we preach to have a better appreciation of the recommendations we regularly give to our patients. Here are some of our honest reflections:
- Thickened Fluids
- Equipment
Our reflection
Each one of us found our own recommendations challenging to follow! It was a hugely powerful reminder that what we so easily advise, is definitely not so easy to do in practice. We must be aware of the implications of our recommendations. It has reinforced to us the importance of that good conversation with people, when deciding how best to help them manage their daily challenge in eating, drinking and swallowing.
IDDSI (International Dysphagia Diet Standardisation Initiative), for more information on the international classification of food & drink texture modification used in Dumfries & Galloway, please refer to https://www.iddsi.org
I’d like to acknowledge and thank Fiona Murchie and Anna Faughey, Speech & Language Therapists for their contributions and work on this blog.
Linda Prevett, Highly Specialist Speech & Language Therapist, Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary Tel : 01387-241422. E-mail : linda.prevett@nhs.scot MSTeams : linda.prevett@dg.nhs.scot