Nutrition and Hydration in Care Settings

Nutrition and hydration training for care settings, delivered at your workplace or live online. Half a day, or a full day on request. The clinical awareness, MUST and IDDSI knowledge, and recording confidence that turns missed early warning signs into early action.

Course Overview

Nutrition and hydration in care is not just about making sure people eat and drink. It is about recognising risk early, understanding the physical, emotional, and environmental factors that affect intake, knowing how to follow clinical guidance safely, and recording and escalating accurately when something is not right. In settings supporting older adults, people with dementia, or those with swallowing difficulties, that awareness is the difference between an individual staying well and a situation that escalates into a clinical emergency.

Dehydration can cause acute confusion that is indistinguishable from dementia deterioration to an untrained eye. Malnutrition significantly increases the risk of falls, pressure damage, infection, and delayed recovery. Dysphagia, if not managed in line with SALT guidance and the IDDSI framework, can cause aspiration pneumonia, which remains a leading cause of death in people with swallowing difficulties. These are not worst-case scenarios. They are real outcomes, in real care settings, where the contributing factor was a staff team that had not been trained to recognise and respond.

This course gives care staff the knowledge and practical understanding to support nutrition and hydration safely, in line with individual care plans, SALT guidance, and current clinical frameworks. The course aligns with CQC Regulation 14: Meeting Nutritional and Hydration Needs, CQC Regulation 9: Person-Centred Care, NICE guideline CG32 (Nutrition support for adults), the MUST (Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool) from BAPEN, the IDDSI framework, and the Care Act 2014 wellbeing principle. It supports Care Certificate Standard 8 (Fluids and Nutrition) in full.

Course Details

  • Duration: Half day (3 to 4 hours). Full day available on request.
  • Delivery: Face-to-face in-house or live online via Zoom or Microsoft Teams
  • Certificate: CPD-Accredited Certificate of Achievement in Nutrition and Hydration in Care Settings
  • Awarding organisations: CPD-Accredited
  • Validity: No formal expiry. Refresher is recommended every 2 to 3 years, or sooner following changes in the care needs of individuals supported, updates to SALT guidance or individual care plans, or where CQC inspection feedback identifies nutrition and hydration practice as a concern.
  • Group size: Maximum 15 learners per trainer

Who This Course Is For

This course is right for any care staff whose role involves supporting individuals with eating, drinking, or mealtimes in any setting.

  • Care assistants and support workers in care homes, supported living, and domiciliary care
  • Senior carers and team leaders
  • Residential and nursing home staff
  • Domiciliary care workers supporting individuals with complex nutritional needs
  • Health and social care professionals who contribute to nutrition and hydration monitoring and recording

Not sure whether this course or a more in-depth dysphagia course is the right fit for your team? Get in touch, and we’ll help you work it out before you commit.

Why This Training Matters

CQC Regulation 14: Meeting Nutritional and Hydration Needs places a direct duty on providers to ensure that individuals receive adequate nutrition and hydration. CQC inspectors look specifically at whether care plans reflect individual nutritional needs, whether monitoring and recording systems are in place and being used correctly, whether SALT guidance is being followed, and whether staff can demonstrate awareness of the risks associated with poor nutritional intake. A service that cannot evidence consistent, safe practice in this area is failing a fundamental regulatory requirement.

NICE guideline CG32 (Nutrition support for adults) provides the clinical framework for identifying adults at risk of malnutrition and ensuring they receive appropriate support. It emphasises the importance of routine screening, monitoring, and escalation. The MUST tool, developed by BAPEN, is the most widely used malnutrition screening tool in UK care homes and community settings. It provides a structured, reproducible way to identify individuals at risk and is referenced in this course as the practical screening framework most care staff will encounter.

The Care Act 2014 places wellbeing at the heart of adult social care. For an individual in a care setting, wellbeing includes physical health, emotional wellbeing, and the experience of mealtimes as a social and dignified part of daily life, not just a clinical task. CQC Regulation 9: Person-Centred Care requires that care is designed around individual needs, preferences, and choices. Both apply directly to how nutrition and hydration support is delivered.

Dysphagia, difficulty swallowing, affects a significant proportion of people in care settings, particularly those with dementia, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and learning disabilities. Unmanaged or poorly managed dysphagia is a serious clinical risk. Aspiration, where food or fluid enters the airway, can cause aspiration pneumonia, which is associated with significant morbidity and mortality in this population. The IDDSI framework provides the standardised terminology and texture descriptors for modified foods and thickened fluids used across UK health and social care. Staff who do not understand IDDSI levels cannot apply SALT recommendations correctly, regardless of how good those recommendations are.

Dehydration in older adults and people with dementia can present as acute confusion, increased agitation, or apparent deterioration in cognitive function. These presentations are frequently misread as disease progression rather than recognised as a reversible clinical problem. A care worker who understands this link will monitor fluid intake differently, record concerns more accurately, and escalate earlier. That is the difference this training makes.

Care Certificate Standard 8 and This Course

Care Certificate Standard 8 (Fluids and Nutrition) requires all new care workers to demonstrate knowledge of the importance of nutrition and hydration, how to support individuals with eating and drinking, and how to recognise and respond to concerns about intake. This course covers Standard 8 in full, including the knowledge requirements around dehydration and malnutrition risk, SALT guidance, modified diets and thickened fluids, monitoring and recording, and escalation.

For a complete guide to the Care Certificate, all 16 standards, and how Prima Cura Training supports organisations to deliver and assess it, visit our Care Certificate UK Guide.

What the Day Covers

Content is adapted to your service type, your client group, and the specific nutrition and hydration challenges most relevant to your team. Topics covered include:

  • Why nutrition and hydration matter clinically
  • Dehydration in care settings: signs, symptoms, and presentations
  • Malnutrition and the MUST tool: how screening works
  • Factors affecting intake: physical, emotional, environmental, and medication-related causes of reduced appetite or fluid intake
  • The IDDSI framework: texture and fluid consistency descriptors
  • Following SALT guidance
  • Person-centred mealtime support
  • Monitoring and recording
  • Escalation: recognising when to escalate
  • Care Certificate Standard 8: applying its principles in day-to-day care practice

Every course is also built to include your care plans, monitoring and recording systems, and SALT referral pathway as standard.

How the Course Is Delivered

This course is available face-to-face at your workplace or chosen venue, or live online via Zoom or Microsoft Teams for teams in multiple locations or with remote workers. Sessions are practical, discussion-based, and built around the real nutrition and hydration situations that care staff encounter. The aim is a genuine understanding of the risks and responsibilities involved, not a theoretical overview of why food and drink matter.

Groups are capped at 15 to ensure every learner has space for the kind of honest discussion this topic generates. We can build content around your specific client group, including services supporting people with dementia, learning disabilities, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, or other conditions that affect eating and drinking, your SALT referral pathway and the IDDSI levels most relevant to your service, and your monitoring and recording systems, including how fluid balance charts and food diaries are completed and reviewed.

Delivery includes:

  • Direct discussion of the presentations most commonly misread in care settings, including dehydration presenting as acute confusion and weight loss masked by incomplete recording
  • Practical discussion of the IDDSI framework and what following SALT guidance correctly looks like in everyday mealtime support
  • Scenario-based work covering the decisions care workers face when supporting individuals with complex nutritional needs
  • Review of your monitoring and recording systems, including fluid balance charts and food diaries

Nutrition and Hydration in Care Settings or Dysphagia Awareness?

Both courses cover safe eating and drinking support, but they go to different depths on different things.

Nutrition and Hydration in Care Settings (this course) gives staff a broad, practical grounding in nutrition and hydration risk: dehydration, malnutrition, the MUST tool, IDDSI awareness, SALT guidance, monitoring and recording, and escalation. It supports Care Certificate Standard 8 and is the right starting point for most care teams.

Dysphagia Awareness goes significantly deeper into swallowing difficulties, specifically: the clinical mechanisms of dysphagia, aspiration risk, and the detailed application of SALT guidance and IDDSI levels. It is the right choice for services where dysphagia is a significant or primary concern across the people they support, or for teams wanting more clinical depth on this specific area.

We don’t make that determination for employers; the responsibility sits with you. But we do provide guidance throughout the enquiry process.

Certification and Validity

On completion, learners receive a CPD-Accredited Certificate of Achievement in Nutrition and Hydration in Care Settings.

A refresher is recommended every 2 to 3 years, or sooner following changes in the care needs of individuals supported, updates to SALT guidance or individual care plans, any incident or concern relating to nutrition, hydration, or dysphagia management, or where CQC inspection feedback identifies nutrition and hydration practice as a concern.

Our Dysphagia Awareness and Assisted Eating and Drinking courses work well alongside this one for services building a more complete mealtime support programme.

Why Organisations Book With Prima Cura

Most training providers arrive with a course. We arrive with yours.

Before the day, we gather information about your workplace: your incident reporting forms, your internal procedures, and the specific hazards your team actually faces. On the day, your trainer works that into every scenario, every discussion, every practical exercise. If your staff work in a care home, they’re not practising on hypothetical office workers. If your team are lone workers, that context shapes how the session runs.

It means the training lands. Not because it was well-delivered in a generic sense, but because it was relevant to the people in the room and the situations they’ll actually encounter.

A few other things that matter to the organisations that book with us:

  • 98.9% learner satisfaction across all Prima Cura courses
  • All trainers hold Enhanced DBS certificates and maintain ongoing CPD
  • We advise honestly on the qualification level at the enquiry stage. If a different course is a better fit for your workforce, we’ll say so before you book, not after

We respond to all enquiries within one working day.

Where We Deliver

We deliver in-house training at your workplace or chosen venue across Manchester, Greater Manchester, and the wider North West. We also deliver nationally across England, including North England, South England, London, and Surrey.

All sessions are led by experienced Prima Cura Training instructors. Groups are capped at 15 per trainer to protect the quality of hands-on learning.

Our associate network means we can deliver across England. You can meet the team on our Associates page.

FAQs

Why is nutrition and hydration a regulatory requirement in care settings?

CQC Regulation 14: Meeting Nutritional and Hydration Needs places a direct duty on providers to ensure individuals receive adequate nutrition and hydration. CQC inspectors look at whether monitoring systems are in place, whether SALT guidance is being followed, whether staff can recognise and respond to nutritional risk, and whether care plans reflect individual needs. A service that cannot evidence consistent, safe practice in this area is failing a fundamental regulatory standard.

What is the MUST tool, and who uses it?

The MUST (Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool) is developed by BAPEN and is the most widely used malnutrition screening tool in UK care homes and community settings. It provides a structured way to identify individuals at risk of malnutrition based on BMI, unplanned weight loss, and the effect of acute disease. This course introduces the MUST tool and ensures staff understand how it is used and what the scoring means in practice.

Is this course suitable for domiciliary care staff supporting people at mealtimes?

Yes. Domiciliary care presents specific challenges: shorter visits, less oversight of what happens between visits, and individuals who may be managing their own nutrition and hydration for long periods unsupervised. Recognising the early signs of dehydration or declining intake, and recording accurately within a short visit, matters as much in someone’s own home as it does in a care home. We deliver this training across Greater Manchester, the wider North West, and nationally, and can adapt content to reflect the realities of domiciliary visiting patterns.

Does this course support Care Certificate Standard 8?

Yes. This course covers the knowledge requirements of Care Certificate Standard 8 (Fluids and Nutrition) in full. For a complete overview of the Care Certificate and how Prima Cura Training supports organisations to deliver and assess it, visit our Care Certificate UK Guide.
 

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Book or Enquire

Book your training or request a quote

Tell us your team size and your sector. We’ll come back with a quote, the right advice on qualification level, and a straight answer on whether this is the best course for your team.

We respond to all enquiries within one working day.

Our Commitment to Quality and Compliance

At Prima Cura Training, all courses reflect current UK guidance and best practice. All trainers are experienced professionals with relevant qualifications and ongoing CPD. Because many of the organisations we support work with vulnerable individuals, all trainers hold Enhanced DBS checks.

This course is reviewed against updates from the Care Quality Commission, NICE, BAPEN, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, and current UK legislation, including the Care Act 2014 and the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. Course content aligns with NICE guideline CG32, the MUST tool, the IDDSI framework, CQC Regulation 14, and Care Certificate Standard 8.

You can read more on our Quality Assurance and Compliance page.

Reviewed by Stephanie Austin, Owner and Lead Trainer, Prima Cura Training | 25+ years in health and social care | 15+ years as a trainer | Last reviewed: June 2026 | Next review: June 2027

This page is for general guidance only and reflects current UK legislation, CQC guidance, NICE guidelines, and clinical best practice as of the date of review. It does not constitute clinical, dietetic, or medical advice. Nutrition and Hydration in Care Settings Training is a CPD-accredited awareness course for care staff and does not replace clinical assessment by a registered dietitian, speech and language therapist, or other qualified clinician. Where individuals have swallowing difficulties, malnutrition risk, or complex nutritional needs, care must be delivered in accordance with the recommendations of the relevant clinical team and the individual’s care plan. Providers remain responsible for ensuring their nutrition and hydration arrangements, SALT pathway, monitoring systems, and staff training comply with CQC Regulation 14, the Care Act 2014, and all applicable legislation and regulatory guidance.

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