What do you need help with: Swallowing difficulties
Eating, drinking and swallowing issues in premature babies, infants, children and young people can cause problems that seriously affect a child’s health and overall quality of life. Difficulties with swallowing can cause chest infections, pneumonia, choking, dehydration, malnutrition and weight loss. The medical term for swallowing problems is ‘dysphagia’.
Issues can include:
- problems with sucking, chewing or swallowing effectively and safely
- difficulties developing their feeding skills
- aversions to a particular taste, texture or method of feeding
- behavioural difficulties associated with eating, drinking and mealtimes
How to make a referral yourself
To make a referral you will need to download and fill in one or more forms and answer questions about what you need help with. Your answers will give our clinical specialists the essential information they need.
It helps if you can give us as much detailed information as possible, such as:
- how long the difficulties have lasted
- how they affect day-to-day life
- other relevant experiences
You may need to share information from a doctor, nurse, other healthcare professional, or school SENCO (Special Educational Needs Coordinator).
Sending the form back to us
We’d prefer that you email the form back to us at cfhd.devonspa@nhs.net.
When you email us, please make sure:
- the documents you send are only in Word (.doc/.docx), PDF (.pdf) or JPEG (.jpeg/.jpg) formats
- each document is attached separately and is less than 3MB in size
- you don’t attach multiple single pages
- the email is less than 10MB in total
If this is tricky for you, you can print out the form, fill it in by hand, and post it back to us at: Single point of Access, 1a Capital Court, Sowton Industrial Estate, Exeter EX2 7FW