Part 1- physical health and keeping active by Morag, a dietician
Allied health professionals (AHPs) are uniquely placed to meet the rehabilitation needs of people with dementia. In this next series of blogs we will showcase the contributions that different AHPs in Lothian are making to help individuals with dementia meet their rehabilitation goals in a way that is personalised, goal orientated and collaborative (Alzheimer Disease International 2025). As you will see from the examples sometimes seemingly small changes can make a huge difference to people’s lives, enabling people with dementia to continue to engage with and enjoy the activities that are important to them. Ultimately, this can also reduce the need for care and support and can increase the time the person can remain living independently at home.
In our first blog series, Jackie, a physiotherapist, Lynsey, a podiatrist and Morag, a dietician, discuss their approaches to promoting physical health, including mobility and falls prevention, foot health and nutrition. They give some examples of how their interventions make a real impact for the people they work with.
You can read their posts over the next three weeks.
- Jackie, a physiotherapist on the 15th Janaury 2026
- Lynsey, a podiatrist on the 22nd Janaury 2026
- Morag, a dietician on the 29th Janaury 2026
Part 1- physical health and keeping active by Morag, a dietician
Hello, I’m Morag Wright and I work as a dietician. Working in mental health, our team supports many people with moderate to advanced dementia, primarily at an inpatient mental health hospital (the Royal Edinburgh Hospital) and at several of our outlying community hospitals across Edinburgh too. We often follow the patients journey from their assessment period following admission from the community, through to supporting them to return home or move to long term care. Our aim as dietitians is to enable the people we work with to optimise their nutrition to support the achievement of their treatment goals. These treatment goals are patient focused and require a multi-disciplinary approach, but using a nutritional lens will typically include improving nutritional status, managing refeeding risk, and correcting malnutrition, alongside managing feeding habits and challenges that arise.
What does rehabilitation and dementia mean to you?
The central pillars of rehabilitation require focusing on optimising a patient’s functioning and reducing disabilities. As dietitians, we know rehabilitation can be detrimentally impacted by poor diet and malnutrition, so one of our first focuses are to help people improve their nutrition through overall calories, protein, and fluids. For people with dementia, due to symptoms of memory loss and confusion, it is quite common for patients to either forget to eat and drink, believe they have already eaten and thus not eat, or to overeat as they forget they have already eaten. Alongside this, people can develop chewing and swallowing difficulties and may have changes to their eating preferences. Due to this, no one person is the same, and many different strategies are needed to help people optimise their nutrition.
Can you tell us about a time you provided rehabilitation for someone with dementia? What difference did that make to them or their carers?
As we are working in an inpatient service, we are fortunate that one of the first barriers to optimising nutrition is removed with the provision of three meals a day from the catering team. The nursing teams on the wards help patients with prompting, encouragement, and assistance as needed during meal times, much as friends, family members, and carers would for those living with dementia at home.
However, before people arrive on one of our wards, it is unfortunately common for people to have experienced a long period of forgetting to eat meals due to cognitive decline alongside unintentional weight loss, and thus we need to step in and optimise their nutrition. For some people, this may be fortifying their food during which we prioritise high energy, high protein options regularly throughout the day, aiming to eat or have a nourishing drink every 2-3 hours. Dementia may result in some people having changing food preferences and choosing what may appear to be peculiar food combinations. As long as the food is safe to eat and the person is not distressed by their food choices, we encourage all options to support people being well nourished. For others, we may need to temporarily recommend supplement drinks like Complan or Ensure to optimise nutrition while the patient is supported to adopt a regular eating pattern again while maintaining their weight. In some cases, for malnourished patients we need to ensure their vitamin and mineral levels are supplemented, and their electrolytes monitored in their blood if they have had minimal food intake for some time to look after them while they start slowly eating food again.
All in all, our dietetic service aims to support people with dementia throughout their journey to optimise their nutrition as well nourished people are better able to function well and support their rehabilitation goals.
Contributor – Morag Wright, Dietician, NHS Lothian
Next month in Part 2 of this series of blogs we will have contributions from Speech and Language Therapy and the Arts Psychotherapies who discuss communication strategies and also the idea of re-connection.
References:
World Health Organisation, Package of Interventions for Rehabilitation for Dementia (2023) content
World Alzheimer Report 2025 | Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI)
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