Taking Time to Find Time: Resident Meals and Weight
Posted by Patti on September 24th, 2008 / Print This Post
From McKniights Long Term Care News:
Over the course of a 48-week trial, researchers at Vanderbilt University assessed the unintentional weight loss of 76 nursing home residents. During the first 24 weeks, half of the group received additional attention during mealtime while the other half served as a control group. For the second 24 weeks, the groups switched roles. Researchers noticed that 52% of residents maintained their weight when they were part of the extra attention group. That compares with 28% of residents in the control group.
During the study, “extra attention” constituted one-on-one sessions of 42 minutes per resident per meal and 14 minutes per resident per snack. Researchers suggest that groups of three or four residents per staff member during mealtimes are more practical and just as effective as one-on-one care.
They could have gotten a group of CNA’s together and reached the same conclusion. Time. Everything takes time. Something the current staffing standards of nursing homes cannot provide. A CNA can be assigned to sit a table with a group of residents for each meal. The aide can eat her own meal and converse with and supervise at the same time. It doesn’t have to be a CNA. It can be an administrator, a DON, an activity aide, even a housekeeper. Anyone can sit down and enjoy the company of residents. It takes some thinking outside the old dusty box.
September 25th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
You’ve gotta love these studies. I know John Schnelle and Sandra Simmons (I’m guessing they were the authors of the study; I didn’t actually bother to look), I don’t think either one has actually ever worked in a nursing home, and I was once caught up in the middle (literally) of a very highly charged verbal escapade between Dr. Schnelle and another professor who disagreed with the validity of the results of another one of his brilliant (ha) studies. This particular study mentioned here was actually one of the more meaningful ones that has been done recently at Vanderbilt. One research project (from Jin Han in the geriatric ER) was recently done that proved that the more risk factors you have for a disease, the more likely you are to have that disease (who would have thought!), and another one (by Diann Grammn of the Nashville Alzheimer’s Association) came to the conclusion that “something should be done about Alzheimer’s disease”, although exactly what that something should be wasn’t part of the study. Perhaps someone should get a grant to do a study to determine if CNAs are a more reliable indicator of reality than research studies are.