1) Nutrition support: this is your bread and butter in hospitals. The type of support you advise is dependent case to case, however general things such as 'food fortification' 'ways to make supplements palatable' 'ways to improve appetite' is a good thing to get your head around. If you don’t have access to any trust leaflets, then I’d suggest looking at BAPEN’s food first leaflets.

2) Refeeding syndrome! Something we're all a bit terrified of! I would say best thing to do is firstly get your head around what it actually is, understand what shifts are occurring in the body - this grounding really does help when you're trying to prevent people going into refeeding. I would say read your PENG, make / ask your lecturers for case studies on refeeding syndrome! You could also have a look at the BDA student rep (Alison Bookers) creative notes (these can be found on her Instagram highlight @the_food_student).

3) Enteral feeding - again something as students we can be super terrified of, I would say the first few you do always is terrifying I remember my first NG patient I took forever!!! But remember the more you practice the better you'll get, again ask / make enteral feeding case studies try out different calculations play with different feeds. (I also would say to get your head around things like knowing what the gastric aspirates should be, managing ETF complications like diarrhoea / nausea vomiting, indications for NG/NJ/PEG.

4) Working out requirements! This requires practice, on each placement dietitians would use what they prefer, I use a mix of the new PENG and ESPEN guidelines! (as a student I always followed the PENG). Maybe practice working out requirements for patients with different diseases ask your dietetic friends to also do it, so you guys can discuss why they did something different or discuss their rationales etc. Perhaps we could attack a case study together since @theaspiringdietitian kindly set up this page.

5) Think about surrogate measures (something easily forgotten about) some patients can't be weighed so familiarise yourself with ulna length / MUAC they're super handy when you assessing a patient and there is no weight or height

6) Practice consultation with whoever your isolating with! If your isolating alone phone a friend and practice! This will help boost your communication skills! There will be many different types of communication barriers you may come across such as language, hard of hearing, dysarthria etc. So, try making up different scenarios I.e a difficult patient not wanting to communicate and practice with a friend and find ways to overcomes these.

Now please remember all the things I've explained above are quite advanced (especially if you haven't done B placement) things to get your head around before placement so if you see yourself struggling that is fine - placement will be there to teach you it all!