Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to NHS England’s Commissioning Excellent Nutrition and Hydration 2015-2018 guidance, published on 8 October 2015, what progress he has made on the commissioning of a workforce to reduce the burden of malnutrition and dehydration through (a) identification, (b) prevention and (c) intervention.

Between November 2017 and March 2019, the NHS England Nursing Directorate delivered two nutrition improvement collaboratives which supported 50 National Health Service provider organisation to deliver improvements in the provision of nutritional care. The overall aims were to:

- Increase the proportion of patients with an accurate nutritional screen;

- Increase the proportion of patients receiving appropriate nutritional interventions; and

- Introduce or increase the use of quality improvement tools and techniques.

The organisations involved in the collaboratives had multi-professional teams including nurses, Allied Health Professionals and caterers. A range of interventions were introduced by the organisations to support improvements including education, training of staff, reviewing availability of equipment to support nutritional screening and assessment. Governance structures were implemented to enable reporting of nutritional care to the trust board. To further build on this a Nutrition Quality Improvement Toolkit is also being developed.