Understand and Meet the Nutrition Requirements of Individuals with Dementia Essay

Words: 940
Pages: 4

1.1 Describe how cognitive, functional and emotional changes associated with dementia can affect eating, drinking and nutrition?
Cognitive: depending on the type of dementia a person has they may have trouble in recognising the food in front of them or not understand that the food provided is for them, they may even view the food in front of them as food. This can be caused by their minds not recognising what is in front of them.
Functional: depending on the type of dementia a person has they may struggle to use their knife, fork and spoon, they may even struggle to chew or swallow. This can be caused by the mind forgetting how to do something, or making that task become more difficult to perform.
Emotional: depending on the type of
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By sticking to a regular meal time, this can be a barrier to the nutrition they need, because they may not want to eat at the same time as everyone else.

2.2 describe how mealtime environments and food presentation can be designed to help an individual to eat and drink?
Food presentation is very important to people with dementia, because their view on things are different, even though its meal time and other people around them are eating. If it doesn’t look like food they won’t eat it. Make sure that the table cloth is a bright colour and that the plate is a completely different colour, as well as different colour food on the plate. Even though to us there is something clearly on the table for someone with dementia, if there was a red table cloth with a red bowl and tomato soup inside, even though there is something there in front of them, they may not be able to see it. 2.3 describe how a person centred approach can support an individual, with dementia at different levels of ability, to eat and drink?
Treating everyone individually and offering them choices with their day to day life are the best ways to support someone with dementia. Many people with dementia are capable of making choices for themselves. So it is important to offer them different meal choices so they can pick which they prefer. If someone has progressed further with their dementia and are unable to communicate to tell us what they want, then we may need to show them the different options or