Last updated on June 15th, 2023
March is National Nutrition Month, so we’re celebrating learning how to make better, more informed food choices and develop healthy eating and activity habits. At your senior living community, your Registered Dietitians play an essential role in caring for residents by helping create healthy, delicious meal plans for a variety of diets.
What is a Registered Dietitian’s Job in Healthcare Communities?
Today, dietitians in healthcare communities are responsible for tasks including new admission assessments and reassessments and consulting with the Interdisciplinary Care Team when residents may be at a nutritional risk due to malnutrition, obesity, cognitive changes, dental changes, wound care, and other high-risk conditions.
RDNs at senior living communities must understand how to determine the most effective intervention for various conditions, like malnutrition, dementia, and dysphagia, because certain conditions can affect how and what residents eat. For example, residents with dysphagia most likely receive a texture-modified diet, and these diets usually consist of thickened liquids as meals to reduce the risk of aspiration. It’s an RDN’s job to help develop appetizing, texture-modified meal plans that provide residents with dysphagia with the nutrients they need.
RDNs at certain communities may also be responsible for educating residents and/or caregivers on healthy habits. If residents return home, they need to know how to maintain a balanced diet to stay healthy. Dietitians will typically work with patients and their families to understand their home life and create care plans that can easily incorporate into the patient’s life outside the community.
How Registered Dietitians Can Prevent Hospital Readmissions
About 20-50% of hospitalized patients are malnourished upon admission. Malnutrition in hospital settings actually increases the length of the patient’s stay, the development of pressure ulcers, infection rates, and the use of hospital resources.
By conducting Nutrition-Focused Physical Exams to help identify the presence of malnutrition and identifying and treating malnutrition, your RDNs can help prevent hospital readmission for patients entering your healthcare community, which can also help maximize your community’s Medicare reimbursement.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) promotes a value-based care model. Through its Skilled Nursing Facility Value-Based Purchasing (SNF VBP) Program, CMS awards skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) with incentive payments based on the quality of care they provide to Medicare beneficiaries, as measured by performance on a measure of hospital readmissions.
Under this program, communities:
- Are evaluated by their performance on a hospital readmission measure;
- Are scored on both improvement and achievement;
- Receive quarterly confidential feedback reports containing information about their performance; and
- Earn incentive payments based on their performance.
This is why it’s crucial to have a great RDN that can promptly assess new admissions and immediately create a plan for what the patient needs. It will improve the resident’s health and quality of life and ensure your community is maximizing CMS incentives.
How to Provide High-Quality Nutrition Care
If you’re looking for a great RDN to join your community, we can help. At Culinary Services Group, we practice evidence-based nutrition and provide highly-qualified RDNs to many of the communities we work with. To ensure they’re providing the best care possible, we also give them ample educational opportunities and encourage them to constantly audit and develop improvement plans. Our RDNs have their own communication channel and get support from a peer-to-peer network of highly trained clinicians. These resources, along with their own clinical experience, allow them to educate residents about their diet and how it may impact their physical, mental, and social health.
Our RDNs also offer Medical Nutrition Therapy. They will work with a community’s medical staff to provide nutritional therapy and counseling services based on current labs, medications, and medical diagnosis using the ADIME process:
- Assessment – Collecting resident data such as nutrition-related history, biochemical data, medical tests and procedures, anthropometric measurements, and nutrition-focused physical findings.
- Diagnosis – Using the assessment data, a nutrition problem may be diagnosed, and contributing factors identified.
- Intervention – Using the nutritional diagnosis, a plan to address and alleviate signs and symptoms is given to the resident to help them work towards objectives set by them and the RDN.
- Monitoring/Evaluation – Goals are tracked and adjustments made to help ensure that nutrition problems are being addressed and progress is made.
We also practice the Nutrition Care Process outlined by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) and utilize their framework and guidance in all of our decision-making. Through regular program evaluations and quality measure reports, we can assess outcomes on weight loss, pressure injuries, and wounds, as well as UTIs, which can improve your community’s overall CMS quality rating.
Working with a partner like Culinary Services Group can provide a certain level of expertise that will benefit your community through collaboration with your Nursing Department for staff on-boarding, education, and training needs. We even partner with a community’s Activities Department to develop fun, nutrition-focused activities for residents.
Registered dietitians are an essential part of your community and play a considerable role in creating a better quality of life for residents and patients. If you want to learn more about how we can provide your community with an expert RDN, contact us here.
