In most areas of health and aged care, service procedures aren’t simply designed once and then left as-is forever. Whether it’s as complex as a surgery or as simple as making sure a resident is taking their medication, these procedures are relentlessly assessed to determine their effectiveness, their flaws, and how they can be improved. It’s an endless search for continuous improvement that aims to smooth out all the kinks in the process and deliver a seamless resident experience.
Cater Care’s experienced dietitians and chefs believe that food and nutrition is just as important and deserves much the same treatment. Our catering services are continually examined and redesigned to improve what we can offer residents, and we can offer five simple tips to help care providers in their pursuit of continuous improvement.
1. Never be idle, always be innovating
Your aged care food menus need to be kept fresh proverbially as well as literally. Building a rich and varied menu of fresh, high quality meals will succeed in delighting your diners exactly once. From there, carers and caterers must be mindful of avoiding repetition that can in turn lead to resident dissatisfaction.
Cater Care tackles this strategy through offering an always-expanding vast pool of meals and cooking techniques for site teams to choose from masterminded by the experts on our Food Team. Even if the same protein might get used a few times throughout the week, it’ll never be cooked the same way twice to ensure an engaging dining experience.
In addition to normal menu additions, our seasonal Food Concepts offer exciting new ways to enjoy the dining experience. These ideas can completely overhaul a site’s service delivery, such as our live Paella Nights that create a real sense of theatre and engagement for residents.
2. Play to your audience
It’s one thing to build a menu that incorporates wild and varied tastes; it’s quite another to build a wide and varied menu that can accommodate the tastes and needs of everyone in a care facility.
Cultural sensitivity has an important place in aged care food menu design that goes overlooked on an alarmingly regular basis. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to delivering exceptional care to residents; menus ought to carefully consider the demographics of a facility’s population and plan accordingly.
Cater Care conducts a thorough assessment of a facility’s demographics and culture when we’re initially designing a site’s catering solution. From there, we can ensure menus are designed with an eye on any cultural requirements to note, potential health issues that the facility’s population may be at risk of, or any other factors that may raise red flags. After this first assessment, site teams continually update individual resident’s SoupedUp profiles with preferences and requirements as needed to maintain an up-to-date database that serves as the basis for continuous improvement.
3. Training is an investment, not an expense
When entrusted with a task as delicate and important as caring for our elderly citizens, it’s essential that everyone involved in the process from beginning to end has completed robust training that will allow them to perform their best. This training can’t be as simple as a brief induction course with a slideshow and a walkaround; the staff training offered to your team members will be the groundwork for the rest of your service.
Cater Care ensures all of our staff are up to the task through a rigorous regime of pre-start staff training that covers all aspects of the service delivery. Cater Care is also proud to make additional training resources available to our client’s team members and community, such as the IDDSI resources provided to family members looking to gain a better understanding of working with texture-modified food.
4. Don’t be afraid of a trial by fire
Sometimes the only way to see if you’re up to scratch is to put yourself to the test and see if you’re found wanting. As part of their expanded legislative powers, governmental auditors have been granted the authority to perform unannounced spot checks of care providers during their regular re-accreditation process. These auditors could theoretically appear anywhere at any point in this process without warning – and if carers haven’t been self-testing against updated compliance requirements, they can only hope they pass the test.
One of the best ways to get out ahead of this issue is to have your facility regularly audited by outside contractors. Cater Care’s Food Safety Team employs a number of staff who are fully qualified to conduct the same kind of compliance checks as government regulators. The insight gleaned from their regular visits is invaluable for making sure that we’re meeting all the necessary standards, and their feedback allows us to make continuous improvements to the already high quality of our service delivery.
5. Keep an open line of communication
The single best source of feedback on your service will always be the people who are depending on it. Providing a dedicated and structured system of collecting feedback from residents is the single fastest way to get a handle on their pain points, and speaking directly with consumers will offer care teams a perspective that they’ll be simply unable to see themselves.
Cater Care has a number of these feedback channels, but our Food Forums are one of our most important ones. These regular events open up the floor to residents and their families to share their thoughts on all areas of our service, offering the community a direct line for requests as big as a total service redesign or as small as putting more meat on the menu. From there, the feedback is developed into a Plan for Improvement, which breaks down the resident’s complaints into a series of actionable end goals for the site team to work towards.
Planning for the future
As the public’s expectation continues to grow higher and further legislative requirements appear on the horizon, it’s becoming clear that placing a real focus on continuous improvement will be key to delivering satisfactory outcomes to consumers. While these five tips offer a valuable insight into some of the ways providers might look to improve, they’re by no means the only way catering services can be enhanced.
If you’d feel better having an expert balancing the plates of improvement and performance, then get in touch with our aged care expert via the details below.
