How to travel with a feeding tube

With Natalie Gentile, clinical nurse consultant and registered stomal therapist at Children’s Nursing Queensland.

Travel safe

Make sure that your insurance is right and up to date. We’ve heard that for some people with stomas, insurances need to change. So making sure your travel insurance encompasses your tube-feeding needs is really important.

Pack right

Practically speaking, feeds are heavy and can be difficult to travel with. You might be able to arrange to have some formulas waiting for you at your destination, but often families are going to have to pack all of their formulas. So making sure that you’ve got the right kind of baggage allowance is really important.

I would also always pack a spare device. It doesn’t happen often, but in recent months, we’ve had families tell us that their gastrostomies burst soon after flying. This doesn’t seem to be consistent with any particular brand or type of G-tube button, it just seems to be what people are saying. So having a spare device is really important.

Train up

If a family isn’t trained in how to reinsert a feeding tube, it might be worth learning how to do this before they go on holiday. If a tubie has a well- established tract – and we would say that’s over six months old – most of the time it’s fine to do a change yourself. And that’s a really important skill that families can learn.

Feeding pumps might be important to take with you, but for a lot of people, if you’re in a bind, you can gravity or syringe feed. Have a chat with your medical team about what a troubleshooting plan looks like if your feeding pump goes out of action.

Travel docs

G-tube buttons and other devices are packaged with a little implant device card. It’s really important that people take this along with them, because you might seek medical support while travelling, whip your shirt up and find that a medical professional has never seen your particular device. This could also be helpful while you’re going through customs at airports.

Also make sure you’ve got a supporting letter from your GP, your nurse, your stomal therapist or whoever it needs to be, explaining what kind of feeding tube you have and how it works.

Bon voyage!

While we’re always available to help with any issues experienced abroad, we don’t often hear from the tube-feeding families we treat while they’re travelling – and I take that as a good sign. It means things are going well. Like most families, they want to travel and experience new things. They just have to make sure that they’ve done that bit of planning beforehand.

This story was made in partnership with Avanos. For easily digestible information about tube-feeding at any age and any stage, visit TubeFed by Avanos.