Meals and nutrition
Someone to shop, cook a proper meal in your own kitchen, and notice when the eating starts falling away.
Clothes going loose is the early warning
Unplanned weight loss is usually the first visible sign that someone isn't managing at home. It shows up before the falls, before the confusion, before anything that gets a name from a doctor. Rings turn on the finger. A belt moves in a notch. The cause is rarely appetite.
What actually happens is that cooking turns into a job with too many steps in it. Standing at the bench hurts. The pan is heavy when it's full. Reading the back of a packet is hard now. So toast stands in for dinner, then toast stands in for lunch as well, and six months later there's a person who has quietly stopped eating properly and hasn't mentioned it to anyone. If you've opened a parent's fridge lately and found three condiments and something from last month, that's what you're looking at.
What a carer does about it
- Cooking a meal in your kitchen and staying while it's eaten hot.
- Batch cooking and portioning into the freezer, labelled and dated, for the days nobody visits.
- Meals cooked to a texture-modified diet, or to diabetic, renal, low-salt, coeliac or cultural requirements.
- Shopping for the ingredients, from your list or with you at the shops.
- Company and prompting at the table for people who've stopped bothering to eat alone.
- Clearing the fridge and pantry of anything past its date.
- Drinks left within reach and topped up, because dehydration builds quietly and lands people in hospital.
- A note of what's actually being eaten, so a change gets picked up now rather than at the next GP appointment.
Cooking for one is a hard problem
Recipes serve four. Vegetables come in bags that go off before one person gets through them. And after fifty years of putting dinner on the table for a household, making a real meal for yourself alone can feel like it isn't worth the washing up, particularly for someone who's been widowed. That isn't laziness. Telling a person to just eat something has never once worked.
Company at the table does work, which is why we ask carers to sit down rather than cook and leave. So does portioning, because a freezer with six labelled meals in it removes the decision entirely on the days when deciding is the hard part.
When the food itself has to change
After a stroke, or with Parkinson's or advanced dementia, swallowing can become unsafe, and a speech pathologist may set a texture level: minced and moist, pureed, thickened fluids. Getting that wrong isn't a small error. Food going into the lungs causes aspiration pneumonia, and it's a common reason people in this position end up in hospital.
Our carers cook to the level the clinician wrote down, not to an approximation of it. If nobody has assessed the swallowing and the weight is still dropping, ask your care manager about a dietitian review through allied health, which is a Clinical support and carries no contribution.
What it costs, and why it looks odd on the invoice
Meals sit in the Everyday living category of Support at Home, next to cleaning and laundry, and that category carries the highest participant contribution of the three. Nursing and allied health are Clinical supports and are fully funded, so you'll see them on the same statement at nothing. The reasoning is that eating is a cost every household has whether or not anyone needs care.
The food itself is yours to pay for, as it always was. Your package funds the person doing the shopping, the cooking and the sitting with you, not the groceries in the bag. Your contribution rate comes from your income and your Age Pension status, full pensioners pay the least, and Services Australia calculates it rather than us.
Getting started
Call 1800 434 002 or use the form below. Useful things to have ready: roughly how much weight has come off and over what period, what a normal day's eating looks like now, and whether there's a diagnosed swallowing problem or a diet set by a clinician. If you're waiting on a package you can start privately and switch across when it's assigned.
Other services
- Domestic assistance — cleaning, laundry and the shopping run.
- In-home nursing — medication, wounds and clinical monitoring.
- Companionship — someone to sit down and eat with.
- All services
Common questions
Do you deliver frozen meals?
No. Our meals service is a support worker cooking in your kitchen, with your pans and your recipes, and batch cooking into your freezer for the days nobody visits. If a delivery service would suit you better, say so and your care manager will talk through what runs in your area rather than push you towards our way of doing it.
Mum has lost a lot of weight. Can you help with that?
Yes, and it is worth acting on quickly. Unplanned weight loss is usually the earliest sign that someone is not coping at home, and it tends to show up before falls or confusion do. A carer cooking real meals and keeping a note of what actually gets eaten will often turn it around. If it keeps going down, ask your care manager for a dietitian review through allied health.
Can a carer cook for a special diet?
Yes. Diabetic, renal, low-salt, coeliac, halal, kosher, vegetarian and texture-modified diets are all normal requests. If a speech pathologist has set a texture level or prescribed thickened fluids, we cook to that level exactly as written rather than to an approximation of it, because getting it wrong risks food going into the lungs.
Who pays for the food itself?
You do. Your package funds the person cooking, shopping and helping you eat, not the groceries. That has always been the rule and it applies to every provider, so anyone offering to buy your food out of your package budget is describing something the program does not allow.
Why do meals cost me more than nursing does?
Meals sit in the Everyday living category of Support at Home, alongside cleaning and laundry, and that category carries the highest participant contribution. Nursing is a Clinical support and is fully funded. The logic is that eating is a cost every household has whether or not anyone needs care. Your rate depends on your income and your Age Pension status.
I still cook. Can I get help with just the shopping and the chopping?
Yes, and it is a good way to keep a skill rather than hand it over. A carer can carry the bags, open the jars, do the peeling and lift the hot tray out of the oven while you run the kitchen. Doing it that way keeps you cooking for years longer than being cooked for does.
Enquire about meals and nutrition
Tell us where you're up to and we'll be in touch. Prefer to talk? Call 1800 434 002.