Our Nutrition and Dietetic team at the Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust provide an acute and community-based service. The service is committed to teaching and training the public and other health professionals about diet and nutrition, they support the production of resources to support training and act as advisers to the Trust on the nutritional standards and specifications for the patient food service.

Patients with memory impairment and cognitive loss can be very easily influenced, when unsure of a decision they may simply take a guess. This can vary from repeating what the person next to them has requested, to naming the first food that comes to their mind. Providing these patients with a name and image is the best method, as this stimulates both the visual and language areas of the brain, increasing the chance of accurate memory recall.

A donation to the Nutrition and Dietetic team at the Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust would enable us to develop pictorial menus for our patients suffering from dementia and other impairment and cognitive loss.  Our picture menus would be designed with user-friendly layouts, colour schemes and images of relevant animals capable of boosting recognition.

Matron Maxine Buyanga from the Trauma & Orthopaedics Services and who is the Trust Nutrition Lead says,“The introduction of a pictorial menu would make a real difference. If a patient is unable to communicate, for whatever reason, they’re able to point or say what they want from those images and it means they can make their own food choices”.

We hope that the pictorial menu will make a positive difference to the Hospital.  It’s exciting to think about just how many patients will benefit from it. 

Thank you!