Dietetics @ Work Continuing Education:

NUTRITION SCREENING OF SENIORS - COURSE SYNOPSIS

This course is being offered free of charge for a limited time! Register now.

Learn how to successfully bring nutrition screening for seniors to your community.

The "Bringing Nutrition Screening to Seniors" (BNSS) pilot project demonstrated that community-based, ethical screening is a viable and successful approach to helping seniors eat well and stay well. It began in October 2000 as a national demonstration project by Dietitians of Canada and Professor Heather Keller, RD, PHD, University of Guelph. Funds for the project were received from the Population Health Fund, Health Canada. Experiences of the BNSS demonstration sites indicated that communities have the capacity to successfully implement nutrition screening. Seniors found to be experiencing nutritional problems benefited from referral and nutritional support. Participating communities became more aware of nutrition concerns of seniors, identified gaps and acted collaboratively to enhance services.

The experiences of BNSS have led to the identification and development of several resources that are available on the Dietitians of Canada website at www.dietitians.ca/seniors. These resources have been designed to support training and guide other communities interested in enhancing healthy eating and well-being of seniors through early identification of nutrition problems.

BNSS demonstrated that nutrition screening is a doable and rewarding approach to enhancing nutrition well-being of seniors. Now we want to support and encourage more practitioners, service agencies and communities to adopt and implement a nutrition screening initiative. The Nutrition Screening of Seniors (NSS) E-Learning lessons are the next step in community support. This interactive e-learning opportunity builds on the tools already created. These lessons will help you appreciate the benefits that a screening project can have for your community. Using the tools and activities provided, you will be able to move from your vision of a nutrition screening project to a concrete planning process. Practical steps will also help you with implementation of screening in your setting.

Course Content Summary

The BNSS Course consists of 2 Lessons. The course includes a series of downloadable activity sheets in PDF and Word format that can be used online or printed and used offline at your convenience. It is expected that each lesson will take about 6 to 8 hours to complete. However, you can take as much time as you need, and you can break up your learning into several smaller sessions.

Slides with accompanying audio, case studies, activity sheets and a glossary are included in the course to reinforce your learning. After each section in lesson 1, a pop quiz will help you locate any areas that you may want to review before taking the final test at the end of lesson 2.

Lesson I

Lesson #1 provides you with the fundamental concepts needed to broaden your understanding of nutritional risk in community dwelling seniors, gain a clearer understanding of the role of screening and screening tools, as well as useful ideas about program evaluation and funding.

Lesson II

Lesson #2 provides you with "take action" information, the "next steps" in making a difference in the health of your community. It will help you to identify what you need to consider before successfully implementing screening in your community. Lesson #2 gives you the chance to learn strategies for working with seniors, identify specific steps to planning and implementing a community screening project, be trained on using SCREEN© and how to train others, as well as how to build upon the experiences of the BNSS demonstration project.

	Represents lessons that are available for purchase. Represents lessons to be announced or that are coming soon.