[Improving the Rate of Eating Safety Guidance Implementation Among the Elderly].

Background & Problem: The provision by nurses of effective swallowing assessments and eating safety guidance improves eating safety in the elderly. The authors of this study found that elderly clients experienced a high proportion of aspiration pneumonia after choking episodes and that the rate of implementation of eating safety guidance among these clients by nursing staff was only 64.6%. The problems identified included a lack of education and training related to eating safety for the elderly, inconsistent health education methods, oral health education only, lack of unified health education content, and lack of proper health education guidance aids.

Purpose: To raise the rate of implementing eating safety guidance among the elderly from 64.6% to 90.0%.

Resolution: The project included promoting an eating safety guidance workflow for the elderly using cross-team collaboration, using human body models and food models, promoting oral healthcare and oral exercises, using multilingual instructional leaflets and videos on eating safety and hygiene education, promoting a treasure hunting activity to the elderly related to eating safely using a food texture selection chart, and implementing a workshop on simulated eating safety scenarios.

Results: After project implementation, the eating safety guidance implementation rate increased from 64.6% to 92.1%, demonstrating that the intervention measures achieved remarkable results.

Conclusions: Formulating care procedures and cooperating across teams to draft concrete and feasible improvement measures effectively increased the rate of eating safety guidance implementation for elderly clients by nursing staff.