Campaña Tragar Bien (Swallow Well Campaign)

Project location: SPAIN
Project start date: May 2017 - Project end date: December 2018
Project number: 2017-060
Beneficiary: Fundació de Recerca en Gastroenterologia

Dysphagia is a quite unknown illness in spite of its high prevalence.
Fundació de Recerca en Gastroenterologia has designed a campaign together with the European Society for Swallowing Disorders (ESSD) in order to increase the knowledge and importance of the illness and to help patients and professionals.

Only 4% of Spanish know what dysphagia is, but:
- 25% of people over 70 years old have dysphagia
- after an ictus, 45% of the patients will have swallowing problems
- most patients with Parkinson, Alzheimer and other neurological illnesses will develop swallowing disorders
- less than 20% of these patients are screened
The consequences of swallowing disorders are critical. Most of patients will have respiratory infections and malnutrition.

With few resources it is possible to achieve important goals. With proper screening, modifications to food texture and liquid viscosity, and oral hygiene it is possible to improve the health of people with dysphagia.

A whole awareness and education campaign is designed based on:

- Continuous press campaign actions with different news along the year to expose through the media what dysphagia is and how important it is. The first World Dysphagia Summit will be held in Barcelona in September 2017. It will be an important event to attract attention of the media, the medical world and the industry.
- Advertisement campaign
- Social Networking
- Free Screening sessions. Agreements with hospitals and other medical centers to provide training to its staff and free screening to potential patients.
- Cooking workshops to learn how to adapt food and liquids with appetizing recipes
- Web with practical information, tips and help for patients and carers.
- Support groups
- Collaboration with prestigious chefs to create attractive receipts and to participate in newsworthy shows
- Activities for World Swallowing Day

The Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation, Delegació a Catalunya awarded a grant for this project. All these activities will take place in Spain

A survey took place some months ago to know how many people know what dysphagia is. Only 4% of Spanish knew.
It's early to say how much this knowledge percentage is expected to improve but the campaign will be extended as many years as possible and every year the survey will be launched to evaluate progress.
In a first phase 15 screening sessions and 10 cooking workshops have been planned.
In a second phase, we aim to extend this to 75 screening sessions and 50 cooking workshops per year.
Part of the press campaign will be based in disseminating the results of the survey and the number of activities done in the hope it will grow like a snowball.
In case of success the experience will be spread all around Europe by ESSD and other local partners.

Dysphagia is a quite unknown illness in spite of its high prevalence. Fundació de Recerca en Gastroenterologia and ESSD has designed the campaign "Swallow Properly" in order to spread the knowledge and importance of the illness and increase the number of patients screened and help them with key information.