A warm welcome to all dietitians working in paediatric home enteral feeding.

You have told us for several years via the BDA Paediatric Specialist Group (PSG) and Dietitians Interested in Special Children Group (DISC), that providing a safe service is a major concern. The inability to work in a clinically safe way, and the effect of working long term with sustained pressure and clinical risk cannot be underestimated for the profession, with subsequent impact on children, young people and their families.

We are aware that better care for children and young people from birth and the neonatal period is improving, leading to more children surviving with complex conditions. In addition, the NHS 10-year plan[1] drive to move care from hospital to community is meaning more children, quite rightly to be cared for in their own home and to be able to access a normal childhood as much as possible.

The BDA Safer Staffing work (2023)[2] has given a steer to focus on the specific area of paediatric home enteral feeding. We want to ask you similar questions, based on this methodology, adding some questions that are specific to paediatric dietetics. This will enable us to produce recommendations on safer staffing levels for dietitians working in paediatric home enteral feeding, so you are able to evidence information to provide a safely staffed paediatric enteral feeding service.

This work is kindly supported financially by the BDA PSG in conjunction with DISC.

We appreciate that some of the questions will require some prior work to be done on your/your teams’ caseload. We appreciate the effort and time that will be involved to do this, but stress that the aim is robust data to enable a better equipped future staffing. The more individuals’ and teams that contribute their data the better the output will be and the more robust the recommendations.

Thank you for your valuable time in completing this survey.

Sue Meredith | BDA PSG & Denise Kennedy | DISC

[1] https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-term-plan/
[2] https://www.bda.uk.com/practice-and-education/professional-guidance/managing-your-workforce.html