Twenty-five years of the EdFED scale: a useful scale for measuring mealtime difficulty in older people with dementia

Watson, Roger

Abstract

The 'EdFED' is the Edinburgh Feeding Evaluation in Dementia (EdFED) scale. 'Ed' points to where the scale was developed-Edinburgh University-and 'FED' is shorthand for 'feeding'. Finding a meaningful acronym is always challenging, but this one seems to have worked: once understood, it is easy to recall.

The development of the EdFED scale arose from my experience in clinical practice in the 1980s. I was a charge nurse in a long-term care setting for older people and the problems that older people with dementia had at mealtimes and our inability to manage these sparked my interest. Early in this journey, it was apparent that we needed some way of measuring these problems and I discovered from doing a literature search that no method existed.

I first reported the EdFED scale in a paper published in 1994 in the Journal of Advanced Nursing, the journal of which I am now the Editor in Chief. The link to that paper and its abstract are provided below.

Watson R (1994) Measuring feeding difficulty in patients with dementia: developing a scale. Journal of Advanced Nursing.19, 257-263. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2648.1994.tb01079.x

Citation

Watson, R. (2020). Twenty-five years of the EdFED scale: a useful scale for measuring mealtime difficulty in older people with dementia. Nursing standard : official newspaper of the Royal College of Nursing, 35(10), 52-55. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 20, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Sep 30, 2020
• Publication Date: 2020
• Deposit Date: Jun 1, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 1, 2021
• Journal: Nursing Standard
• Print ISSN: 0029-6570
• Publisher: RCN Publishing (RCNi)
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 35
• Issue: 10
• Pages: 52-55
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3617277