Treloar’s have taken a leading role in upskilling future dietitians from the University of Surrey, inviting two undergraduates to join the dietetic team on placement thanks to funding support from The Cooks’ Charity. What’s Cooking delved into what has been happening and the impact it is making.
Over the last year, Treloar’s has, in partnership with Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust, developed a placement programme allowing for two students studying a BSC in Nutrition and Dietetics at Surrey University to spend one day a week for 12 weeks during their final placement working with the Treloar’s dietetic team to learn first-hand about the students’ needs and how the team at Treloar’s manage them.
The two students, Lois and Lily, spent time with students assessing their nutritional intake, carrying out dietetic reviews, presenting complex cases, and attending students’ multi-disciplinary team meetings This helped them to fully understand how the standard approach to dietetics needed to be modified to support the Treloar’s students’ specific needs.
In addition to special considerations such as differences in body composition and distribution, standard nutritional requirement calculations need to be adjusted for non-active or wheelchair-based individuals, effects of medical diagnosis on requirements (e.g. dystonia significantly increases the amount of calories used), reflex and gut disorders, and effects of a modified diet on nutritional intake.
The team at Treloar’s also need to consider how to fit eating and drinking and/or tube feeding into a busy routine which includes lessons, day trips, care needs, hydrotherapy, physiotherapy, emotions, sleep, and medications (which can be to up to 15x a day).
In addition to this, most of Treloar’s’ students and their families have experienced trauma. Working in a trauma-informed way is vital to understanding the triggers and how to manage them.
Communication is a massive issue. Dieticians are usually taught to use counselling skills and ask open questions. This can be challenging for students with communication needs. 60% of Treloar’s students are non-verbal or require assistance with communication. Learning how to adapt to using more closed questions whilst still fully exploring issues was a steep learning curve for Lily and Lois. They also realised how important using a multi-disciplinary approach with speech and language therapists can be. This collaborative placement was extremely beneficial for them, and it completely opened their eyes to what it is like to be one of the Treloar’s students.
Without this placement, Lois and Lily would have received little in dietetic management and how far reaching the implications of nutrition are.
As well as the benefit of the placement, The Cooks’ Charity funding enabled Elaine Ashcroft, the lead dietitian at Treloar’s, to deliver specialist content to dietetic students at Surrey University. This two-hour lecture included two short videos of Treloar’s students. The dietetic students were asked to note the differences between a standard dietetic approach and how this might need to be modified to consider the special adaptations required for young people with a Neurodisability such as cerebral palsy. Elaine also put together case study scenarios for the students to break into groups and think about how this could be tackled in practice. The lecture received positive feedback from those attending who described it as ‘a breath of fresh air,’ something so different and content relevant.
It is Treloar’s hope that funding can be repeated so that the lectures can become annual events and expand to other universities. Sharing highly-specialist knowledge including Neurodisability and extraordinarily complex needs will help prepare student dietitians in supporting patients in a hospital environment. What is exciting here is that this knowledge can be promulgated among UK’s dietitians and have immense impact.
In Treloar’s Other News…
Understanding Allergies & Intolerances
Treloar’s have completed an audit of students’ allergies and intolerances and found that almost half of students were affected. The categorisation is vital since some food intolerances can result in a serious reaction and how these are managed and graded will further improve safety management of these students and inform their food service provision.
Expanding the Provision of Blended Diets
What’s Cooking has highlighted the benefit of blended diets and in the 2025 intake, there is a growing demand for such diets. This is partly due to research showing the positive benefits of a blended diet and recognition of them as a non-pharmacological treatment for gastro-intestinal dystonia. Treloar’s cohort of students on blended diets will be starting with them from a much younger age, meaning that they will be students at Treloar’s for 10-15yrs. It is even more important to continue development of their blended diets to cater for a wider variety of students and their needs and demonstrates the need to expand provision
The positive impact of blended diets can be amply shown with Jude, who is unable to eat or drink orally due to an unsafe swallow, so he receives his nutrition and hydration using a gastrostomy tube. He is an avid Harry Potter fan and was extremely excited to be attending Harry Potter World. Jude maintains that he can “taste” feed and fluid given via gastrostomy into his stomach. Jude’s dietitian, Emily Hunter understood his desire to make the most of his experience and modified his feed plan to allow him to be given a small amount of Butterbeer while he was on his trip. Jude described the drink as “disgusting!” but loved the fact that he could share in this experience.
It is only by having dietitians on-site at Treloar’s that they can get to know the students so well and respond to their needs, therefore enabling these experiences to happen.
Sharing Knowledge
Knowledge sharing has always been important to Treloar’s to promote how essential the specialist dietetic services provided by them are, in the hope that when students leave Treloar’s they can continue to enjoy similar levels of support.
