The Nutritional Toolkit

The Nutritional Toolkit was developed by the team at the Assessment and Treatment Unit, Ash Green which is part of the Specialist Learning Disability Service, Derbyshire County Primary Care Trust. The team commenced work on the Essence of Care Nutritional Benchmark (2001) and the user friendly innovation was produced as a result of the project in conjunction with ‘Valuing People’ (Department of Health 2001).

The objectives for this project were very clear and simple. The team wanted to give their patients a greater degree of confidence and independence combined with the ability to make more of their own decisions. They also wanted to find a very simple way to further encourage one to one interaction between professionals and patients. The objective of the Essence of Care project was to help the team develop and improve service provision and to identify various patient needs.

The nutritional toolkit is portable and very easy to use. It is suitable for use in the home as well as for use in Hospitals, Clinics or day services with adults and children who have varying mild to severe learning disabilities. The kit can also be used for educational purposes.

The innovation is instantly recognisable with cheerfully designed components that can be very easily replaced. The contents are all safe, durable and easy to clean. The cards had to satisfy the requirements of the many varied meals so the pictures are simple enough for the individual to be able to identify both the food type and the ingredients. Special dietary requirements also had to be considered. The objectives behind the design of the cards was to clearly incorporate and emphasise the Government’s ‘5 A Day’ recommendation. (Department of Health, 2007, 5 a day health benefits DOH).

The innovation, which was a finalist for the Health and Social Care Awards 2008, clearly satisfied the competition’s following criteria:

• Had been developed as a result of an identified problem
• Enabled the delivery of  an approach to health care that would not otherwise have been possible
• Had a holistic approach to the use of this technology which has addressed explicitly the ‘people’ and ‘process’ issues
• Demonstrated clear thinking on the adoption issues surrounding the technology
• Demonstrated originality and inventiveness.

The original kit was used very successfully in and around the various departments of the unit to assess its effectiveness, potential value, educational benefit and general use from both the professional and individual perspective. Working in collaboration with NHS Innovations East Midlands and Mustard Merchandise the designers, the team  developed a version which  has been scheduled for an extensive adoption study within the NHS, Private and Public sector organisations.  This study is also being supported by East Midlands Healthcare and Biosciences i-NET.