Award-winning research improves the quality of care and quality of life for people with swallowing disability in residential care settings.
Image by Gary Radler. Used for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted in the images are models.
Food and eating are an important part of the human story in all cultures. Sharing food underpins community, relationships, good health and wellbeing. So what happens when a person has difficulty swallowing?
“Swallowing is something most of us take for granted. However, an estimated 8 per cent of the world’s population have dysphagia or difficulty swallowing,” says Professor Bronwyn Hemsley, Head of Speech Pathology at UTS.
“Dysphagia affects an estimated 50 per cent of people with cerebral palsy, intellectual disability or stroke. This not only impacts on their health and quality of life, but their safety.”
“Tragically, choking on food and aspiration pneumonia, a lung infection related to breathing in food, fluid or saliva, are some of the leading causes of preventable death in residential care settings.”
In fact, coughing or choking on food is so common for many people with disability that support workers might think of it as normal.
People with disability also often say, “you know, I always cough on my food”, not realising there are options and opportunities to prevent it.
“As a speech pathologist, I thought about the scale of how many people must be having not just unpleasant mealtimes, but dangerous ones. Reading about the deaths of people with disability due to choking, I resolved to do something about it,” says Professor Hemsley.
Read the full article here: Cooking up safer mealtimes together.