How to prepare food for tube feeding by Siriraj

This is based on a video in Thai by Siriraj PR channel. Siriraj is one of the main hospital located in Bangkok, Thailand. The video contains the ingredients, utensils, preparation and storage of food for tube feeding made mainly from fresh ingredients.

VIDEO FROM SIRIRAJ PR

Note: I try to translate on best effort basis as my understanding of Thai language is still somehow limited. In order to see how the meal is prepared, you would need to watch the entire video. You may watch directly from YouTube via this link (https://youtu.be/0iepfbQMcC4).

What you would need:

1. A food blender
2. Weighing scale
3. Funnel (to pour the finished feed into the container)
4. Cooking ladle
5. Stainless steel fine sieve
6. Containers
7. Measured spoons
8. Glass container to place the blended food (the container must be able to close air tight)
9. Jug with clean boiled water of between 1.5 litres to 2 litres

The steel items above needs to be boiled in hot water of between 10 to 15 minutes for sterilization. For plastic items, go over with hot water. Ensure attire worn is clean and for those with long hair, to neatly tie at the back (in hospitals they actually put a hair cap to avoid hair from dropping into the food).

Wash hands clean and slip on a pair of disposable rubber gloves.

This would involve preparation of tube feeding meal of approximately 1000 kilo calories. The preparation is done once for the entire day’s meal.

The ingredients are as follows (start from 1.45min):

1. Eggs– one whole egg, and another egg with the yolk removed (meaning, there are 2 egg white ad 1 yolk)
2. Minced chicken meat 90gm (can replace with lean pork meat or fish flesh)
3. Six and a half pieces of bread weighing about 162.5 gm
4. Green vegetable of about 100gm (only the leaf, do not use the stalk) (can replace with other vegetables like carrot ##)
5. 5 teaspoons of sugar
6. 1 tablespoon of oil such as corn oil ## (do not use palm oil, pork oil or coconut oil)

Preparation (starting from 3 min):

1. Weigh the items
2. Boil the eggs to make it hard boil eggs. Remove the shell then go over the peel hard boiled egg with hot water before use.
3. Boil the vegetable and meat. Do not use a lot of water but just enough to boil the ingredients. Retain the water used to boil the vegetable and soup for blending later.

Blending the ingredients (at 3.23min onwards)

Note: In other videos, it is usually mentioned that the total blended food should be about 1000ml. Please ensure within 1000ml, all the ingredients are contained within.

1. Mix all the ingredients together. Add the water (used to boil the vegetable and meat) to help blend the food.
2. Add boiled water to help with blending
3. Blend between 3 to 5 minutes until all the ingredients are fine.
4. Sieve using the fine stainless steel. If you find that there are still lumps, then add a little water and blend again till fine. Then sieve again till all ingredients are in semi liquid form. Note: You need to sieve to ensure the constituency is fine enough. If not, the food may lodge at the feeding tube.

Storage of prepared tube feeding food

Place in airtight bottles. Store in the fridge on the top shelf. Do NOT store in the freezer or the fridge door/vegetable compartment (not cold enough and food may spoil).

The prepared food must be consumed within 24 hours. Cannot be kept after that.

Reheating the food (4.50min onwards)

Place the bottle on a container with warm water (not exceeding 80 degrees). Do note that once the bottle feed is removed from the fridge, it needs to be consumed within 2 hours.

Do NOT heat in the microwave nor heat it directly in a pan as it would destroy all the nutrients .

Test the temperature at the back of the palm of your hand before feeding. Test it is warm enough but not too hot or cold.