Paediatric Eating and Feeding Course for Dietitians 2027

Course Description

This professional development course is designed to strengthen your skills, confidence, and competence as a Dietitian supporting children with feeding difficulties. It has been developed to consolidate and advance your dietetic assessment and intervention skills, while also extending your scope to include knowledge and practical strategies within the transdisciplinary feeding space.

Unlike many paediatric feeding courses developed by non-Dietitian professionals, this program has been created by a Dietitian exclusively for Dietitians. This ensures that every component of the course aligns with dietetic practice and supports your learning through a dietetic lens.

Throughout the course, you will learn how to assess your own scope of practice in paediatric feeding and understand how you can best contribute within a paediatric feeding team. You will gain clarity on when to lead as a feeding therapist and when additional team members may be needed to help clients achieve their goals. You will also be introduced to models that explore not just the what of eating, but the how, where, why, and who with—supporting a holistic and family-centred approach to feeding.

Delivered across three live online sessions, this course offers flexibility to join from any location. All live sessions will be recorded and made available to participants for 90 days following the final workshop.

Your learning will be supported through interactive case studies, recommended readings, resource ideas, and further learning and development suggestions to enhance your clinical practice.

This course is designed for practising Dietitians in Australia. Enrolment is not open to other allied health professionals. If you work in another discipline and are interested in learning with us, please get in touch to discuss training or supervision options.

Course Objectives

This course is designed to:

• Enhance your confidence in supporting children who experience eating and feeding challenges and differences

• Increase your knowledge of how to effectively set up and undertake complex dietetic assessments for children with eating and feeding differences

• Strengthen your dietetic and transdisciplinary assessment skills and clinical judgement to ensure your interventions are individualised and set up for success

• Assist you to understand your own scope of practice and explore options for extending your dietetic and transdisciplinary skills

• Build your understanding of multidisciplinary team roles in supporting children with eating, feeding, and drinking differences

• Support you to reflect on your current skills in working with families who experience feeding challenges

• Help you identify areas for further learning and develop an individual learning plan to support your ongoing growth and success

About the presenter (Maddie Todd)

• Maddie is an Accredited Practising Dietitian from Australia who has specialised in developing and providing clinical services to people with disabilities, and in particular, children who experience eating and feeding differences

• Maddie has significant experience in tube feeding in adults and children, including supporting blended diets and tube wean trials

• Maddie has worked under the NDIS funding model since its inception so have excellent knowledge of the ‘ins and outs’ of the funding scheme. Maddie keeps up to date with the changes to the scheme, and is a strong advocate for people receiving dietetic services to support their function and enhance their quality of life. Maddie has worked at the national level to advocate and influence policy changes within the NDIS so that people with disabilities can receive dietetic services and nutrition support products

• Maddie adopts a responsive feeding approach and has a strong focus on supporting positive feeding relationships and eating experiences

• Maddie is the proud owner of Hatch Dietetics, a busy private practice specialising in working with children and people with disabilities and supporting health care professionals

• Maddie has successfully started and grown a thriving disability dietetics service and specialist feeding team within a large not-for profit business

• Maddie loves teaching and supervising other health care professionals, and is passionate about people with disabilities receiving the highest quality dietetic services and living their best lives

Course content

Session 1: Clinical dietetic assessment for children with eating, feeding and mealtimes difficulties

• Understanding the Australian context for children with feeding differences

• Models of assessment for children with feeding differences

• How to use a strengths-based approach when undertaking your dietetic assessment

• Tips to conduct your dietetic assessment so you can obtain all the clinical information required to work effectively with children and families

• Detailed dietetic assessment (ADIME approach) for children who eat orally and/or are provided nutrition via feeding tube. Education topics include:

• Anthropometry: Assessing growth and understanding when deviations in growth may be occurring, taking anthropometric measurements, understanding the use of standard and specialised growth charts, alternative height measurements and equations, indicators of malnutrition, anthropometric equipment, practical tips for taking accurate anthropometric measurements

• Biochemistry: Specific considerations for children with disabilities, practical tips on attaining biochemistry in children

• Nutrition-Focused Physical Findings: Assessing causes for elevated or low appetite, energy levels to maximise nutritional intake, nutrition-focussed physical assessment, oral cavity considerations, pica, bowels, pressure injuries, hydration, red flags for pharyngeal dysphagia, screening stoma sites in children who are fed via tube, tube feeding assessments, screening seating and positioning

• Client history: Ecomaps, common medications for children with disabilities, medication considerations in relation to diet and function, social circumstances, restrictive practices, considerations around autonomy and decision making

• Dietary: Creative approaches for obtaining dietary information, practical tips on how to collect dietary information, assessing responsive feeding practices, tips for assessment with children requiring texture modified diets, blended diet assessment considerations, mealtime observations and assessments

• Indirect assessment: Using Z scores, estimating nutritional requirements in children with specific diagnoses

• Case formulation and person-centered goal setting 

• Developing your learning plan

The session will conclude with a range of resources to support your clinical assessments and practice.

Session 2: Advancing your dietetic practice – developing your transdisciplinary knowledge and skills in relation to paediatric feeding

This session will support you to extend your dietetic scope of practice to be able to complete transdisciplinary paediatric feeding assessments. This will support you to deliver transdisciplinary feeding interventions and know when and who to involve in a clients multidisciplinary feeding team. You will be encouraged to reflect upon your own personal scope of practice and build your multidisciplinary networks to ensure the highest quality care for your clients.

The session includes the following topics:

• Understanding transdisciplinary practice in paediatric feeding and where and how a Dietitian can be part of a multidisciplinary team (as well as take the lead as a feeding therapist)

• Paediatric feeding disorder and ARFID diagnostic criteria – exploring diagnostic criteria, understanding similarities and differences, considerations for diagnosis

• Understanding the early feeding journey and feeding progression for infants and children so that you can appreciate how the feeding journey can impact both caregivers and children

• Neurotypical feeding development from birth to 36 months – feeding reflexes, physical development, oral motor structures and development, gross and fine motor development and social and emotional development

• Oral phase dysphagia – understanding the basic mechanics of chewing and red flags for oral motor delays, so that you can undertaking screening and know who to refer to

• Sensory aspects of feeding and sensory regulation and processing differences

• Feeding equipment options for children with feeding challenges to support their skills and independence

• Assessing mealtimes – environment, routines, structure, understanding factors that support a child to do their best eating

• Reviewing opportunities to experience a variety of food

• Understanding parenting styles and the feeding dyad

• Understanding and reviewing feeding cues and caregiver responses

• Mealtime behaviours - how to assess and unpack mealtimes to deeply understand the what the child is telling us through their behaviour and communication

• The feeding relationship and responsive feeding practices

Session 3: Dietetic and transdisciplinary feeding interventions

This session will include a range of case studies to support you to develop your confidence in supporting both dietetic and transdisciplinary feeding interventions. The session includes the following topics to support your learning:

• Understand the roles of other essential feeding team members so that you know how to best support your clients

Dietetic-specific interventions:

• Maximising dietary intake and nutrition in children with feeding differences

• Practical tips on introducing nutrition support products and micronutrient supplementation

• Blended diets, and,

• Supporting feeding tube weaning trials

Supporting individualised transdisciplinary feeding interventions:

• Creating mealtime and eating opportunities that promote body safety for children

• Creating harmonious, calm or neutral mealtimes 

• Mealtime structures that work with a child's appetite

• Direct feeding therapy interventions – understanding when it may (or may not) be appropriate/necessary to work directly with a child to undergo feeding therapy, broadening the lens of what feeding therapy can entail to best support children, safe food exposure activities for tube fed children

• Strategies to support caregivers in their feeding partnership role

• Exploring sensory-based feeding therapy interventions

• Guiding principles of neurodiversity affirming clinical practice

• What to include in your feeding therapy kit

• Understanding oral motor intervention approaches and equipment to support chewing skill development

• Understanding options for assistive equipment to support feeding independence

• Understanding the evidence base for supporting children with ARFID

• Principles of behaviour change and caregiver coaching to develop person-centered goals and realistic interventions

• Q&A session

• Case studies

This session will also provide you with ideas on how to continue to upskill in paediatric feeding and highlight further learning opportunities. You will be encouraged to develop your own personal learning plan to enhance your clinical practice.

Bonus webinars

If you enrol in the full course, you will receive access to three bonus webinars to assist your clinical practice:

• Understanding function and the NDIS

• Writing function-based dietetic reports

• Tips to set up your dietetic service to ensure it is accessible and inclusive to everyone

Bonus case studies

If you enrol in the full course, you will receive access to pre-recorded case studies which explore assessments and interventions to assist you to reflect on your clinical practice and enhance application of knowledge gained in the course.

Learn more about Hatch Dietetics

Come and see what we have to offer:

Web: www.hatchdietetics.com.au

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hatchdietetics/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/hatchdietetics

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maddie-todd-641728211/