AHPs Day special: 60 seconds with Charlotte Foster, Dietitian at Barts
What is your job title?
Senior Specialist Dietitian – I work within the Adult Cystic Fibrosis and Difficult Asthma MDTs. Within Barts Health, there teams of Dietitians working across SBH/RLH/NUH/WXH and MEH in the Community across the majority of medical specialists in both adult and paediatric services.
What does being an AHP mean to you?
Being an Allied Health Professional means playing a role in providing care to support the recovery, rehabilitation and restoration of a person’s health. The various 15 AHP teams are like different segments of the “healthcare orange” that surrounds the core medical and nursing team to ensure holistic care for the patient is provided.
What attracted you to becoming a Dietitian?
Like most who work in healthcare, I wanted to help people! Practicing as a Dietitian has enabled me to combine my love of food and interest in understanding how nutrition impacts our health. The field of nutrition is so broad and with an ever growing and emerging evidence base, you are constantly learning and developing as a clinician which I really love.
How did you become a Dietitian?
There are usually two routes – I chose the more complicated way! There are a variety of universities offering BSc degrees (a combination of theory and clinical placements over a 3-4year course) or the option to study for a postgraduate diploma or MSc.
What does your job involve day to day?
No day is the same! For me personally I have a varied caseload in giving dietary advice on the wards and in outpatient clinics. Through a combination of nutritional assessment and tailored dietary advice, Dietitians aim to implement evidenced-based dietary interventions such as nutrition counselling, review of dietary intake, supplementation (with high protein, high energy drinks), use of enteral formulas and parenteral nutrition.
What do you like most about your job?
I love the “face time” I have with my patients and the relationships that you build with them (particularly as I work with a lot of chronic disease patients). I enjoy MDT working and am fortunate to work within 2 well established teams.
What’s your proudest achievement as a Dietitian?
I have really enjoyed my time working as a Dietitian within Barts Health. I have been fortunate to gain experience in lots of different specialisms across the trust. Through this, there have been many wonderful and rewarding moments with patients, where you feel your input has made a real difference to their care. For me, this is what makes me proud - knowing that the work our profession does really makes a difference.
What would you tell someone who is thinking of becoming a Dietitian?
Go for it! I love my job and the field of nutrition is so varied and wide, your career options are endless.
What has been your biggest challenge in your role?
Overcoming the pseudoscience and nutrition nonsense that people can believe is a real challenge! Nutrition, food and lifestyle are hot topics and always makes the media headlines and sadly there is a lot of misinformation out there.
Another challenge is that we are one of the smaller groups of the AHPs within the trust and so often rely on our other healthcare professional colleagues to highlight patients who need to receive dietetic input. Within Barts Health, on the wards there are 2 nutritional screening tools used to identify patients at risk of malnutrition (MUST in adults and STAMP in paediatrics). Ensuring these screening tools are completed accurately and in a timely manner has been a challenge for our teams. We have been doing lots of work with the wards to help ensure all patients are screened and that appropriate referrals are generated.
If you could do another AHP role for a day, what role would it be and why?
I would like to experience being an Occupational Therapist. They play such a key role in helping patients adapt to being able to carry out the day to day tasks we all take for granted.