Reflecting back on a fantastic 2019

As the year draws to a close and many of us look forward to winding down over the Christmas period, we at the Malnutrition Task Force (MTF) thought it would be the perfect time to look back and reflect on 2019. 

It certainly has been a busy year, not just for the Malnutrition Task Force, but the wider community as a whole. We saw the introduction of system-wide change in the NHS Long term plan and welcomed news of the NHS Food Review chaired by MTF member Phil Shelley. However after a politically turbulent year we await to see how the new Government will address the social care crisis and failings in the prevention green paper, which disappointingly did not mention malnutrition, so we know there’s still work to be done.

For the MTF, we have continued our work in raising the profile of preventable malnutrition with the public, professionals and policy-makers.

It has been a year of launches for us with a new logo, our brand new website which contains helpful information and resources for both the public and professionals, our nutrition wheel, a tool which can be used in the community to identify risk of malnutrition and our new resource, Eating Well in Later Life, which contains practical tips for eating as life changes.

Booklet

 

In October, we ran Malnutrition Awareness Week 2019 in partnership with BAPEN. The week was a great success - the MTF twitter page earned 43.3k impressions (number of times tweets were seen) and an impressive 1011 engagements with our tweets. We also saw events taking place all over the UK in hospitals, care homes and out in the community.

In September, we held our second learning event which saw delegates from around the UK learn about preventable malnutrition and how to use the MTF screening toolkit to identify malnutrition back in their communities. We were also pleased to hold the successful National Hydration Network conference which was chaired by Naomi Campbell.

It really has been a great year but our work is not over yet! Going into 2020, the MTF will continue to raise the profile of malnutrition by promoting our screening toolkit, developing our website and engaging with our new government and other senior stakeholders.

We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who has supported us this year – we really could not do our work without the fantastic support of the wider community. We look forward to working with you all in 2020 and wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Meriel and Lesley

MTF Team

 

P.S. We always want to hear from you so please get in touch if you have any examples of new initiatives, feedback or any other queries by contacting enquiries@malnutritiontaskforce.org.uk or follow us on twitter @MalnutritionTF