From Recommendations to Real-World Care: Operationalizing Goal-Concordant Eating Care in Serious Illness

Description:

Eating and nutrition care in serious illness involves complex decisions shaped by clinical evidence, patient and family priorities, available resources, and the realities of everyday care. For those providing eating and swallowing care to these patients, identifying a clinically-sound recommendation is only part of the challenge: recommendations must also be translated into care that is feasible and sustainable across patients, families, clinicians, and care settings. This talk will examine where and why breakdowns occur across multiple levels of eating care, drawing on existing work on eating-related disparities and emerging conceptual work focused on operationalizing care within broader life context. We will conclude by considering how this perspective may inform future approaches to making goal-concordant eating care in serious illness actionable in real-world settings.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Raele Donetha Loy is a speech-language pathologist and Researcher II in the Center for Health Disparities Research and the Swallowing and Salivary Bioscience Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has received multiple NIH grants to support her work examining dysphagia in serious illness. Currently a Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center REC Scholar, Dr. Loy seeks to develop and evaluate person-centered approaches that improve goal-concordant eating care for older adults with serious illness by addressing the clinical, social, and health system factors that shape care decisions and their implementation.