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Success Stories
November 2, 2023 - Health Care Professional
CMAW 2023 Success Story at Kingston General Hospital
This year at Kingston General Hospital's Canadian Malnutrition Awareness Week, we embraced the "Stronger Together" theme and endeavored to spread awareness to other health care professionals outside the dietitian department.
The CMAW team hosted the following events:
- Lunch-and-Learn with the Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy teams on malnutrition and muscle wasting, which included a hands-on session where we used our newly purchased hand-grip dynamometers and BIA scale and discussed how to appropriately use them in our patient populations
- Published Blog on our staff Intranet page "Why Dietitians care so much about malnutrition, and why you should too!"
- Hosted a trivia-style Lunch-and-Learn for the nursing clinical learning specialists entitled "Food For Thought: Malnutrition Awareness Week Trivia Challenge". This was very well-received, they had loads of fun and everyone said they learned a lot! Prizes were generously donated by our food service provide
- To reach more staff on the units, we created a roving cart trivia challenge as well. Staff were challenged to spin the wheel and were asked malnutrition trivia questions from one of 5 categories. If they answered the question incorrectly, we let them choose (if they were willing) and oral nutrition supplement or thickened fluid to do a "shot" of. If anyone got three questions in a row correct, they won a gift-card. A lot of staff were surprised to find they didn't mind the taste of the oral nutrition supplements. There was so much engagement with the cart, we only made it to half as many units as initially planned so we will be rolling (literally) this out again in future!
- We ended the week with a dietitian-specific session about sarcopenia obesity.
Overall we found the trivia format to be a fun way to engage staff. Free lunches and prizes were a great motivator (we always approach our vendors and food service providers for support for these events). It's always difficult to reach the floor nurses and residents but we found the roving cart was a great way to reach these staff members!
Story submitted by Paola Hunter, Registered Dietitian, Kingston Health Sciences Centre at Kingston General Hospital site