- Familiarize yourself with the National Dysphagia Diet (NDD) and its strengths and limitations.
- Educate other health care providers in your institution about the potential risks of "prescribing" diet modified fluids and foods based on dysphagia severity rating scales.
- Make sure staff understand the importance of customizing diets to the diversity of patients' individual preferences and abilities and do not apply a specific diet as a "formula."
- Meet with other health care providers in your institution to establish, define, and promote the use of terminology to describe viscosity and texture modifications that is understood by all.
- Support diet recommendations with instrumental evidence that documents the patient's response to modified fluid and food textures. Recommendations for diet modifications must be evidence-based.
- Use standardized diagnostic materials that have comparable viscosity to the fluids and foods you use in treatment.
- Be aware that texture-modified diets prepared in the majority of health care kitchens are probably not developed using any industry standard and do not undergo rheological testing to determine their viscosity.
- Be cautious when using or recommending commercially modified fluid and food products that are not labeled with viscosity values.
- Be aware that standards and science are limited within the domain of texture-modified fluids and foods for dysphagia management.
- Keep up-to-date about studies that clearly demonstrate the impact of texture-modification upon swallowing physiology in the dysphagia literature. In addition, refer to future issues of The ASHA Leader and Perspectives on Swallowing and Swallowing Disorders (the quarterly newsletter for Division 13) for updates.
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