In an industry charged with a responsibility as serious as caring for and protecting the health and happiness of our elderly loved ones, ensuring there’s a sufficiently high standard of training and best practices is essential. When it comes down to specific staffing arrangements, it’s also important not to underestimate the value of expertise and appropriate specialisation. You wouldn’t have a plumber design a skyscraper, so why have an expert aged care provider plan and prepare aged care food menus?
Catering in a Post-Commission World
In recent years, residential aged care in Australia has been modernising at an incredible pace. A key area impacted by this has been staffing, particularly in the provision of food services in aged care centres. Previously, catering was seen as a lower priority than other areas and so received comparatively little attention and dedicated staff. Since the 2019 Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, this attitude has been forced to change; the Commission has since developed a dedicated complaints hotline for the quality of catering in aged care, and having a pool of plentiful and well-trained staff has come to be seen as a key step in improving the situation.
First Steps Forward
One of the first steps taken to improve the standard of care available to Australians was the implementation of the Basic Daily Fee Supplement; an additional ten dollars per resident, per day, of government funding explicitly intended to raise catering budgets for facilities (Department of Health and Aged Care, 2023).
At the same time, the Commission realised this could only be one part of a multi-pronged strategy and issued a sweeping list of recommendations. Among them was the recommendation that residential aged care providers should also provide tailored nutritional care that better enables their residents to lead healthy and happy lives (Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, 2023). To better achieve these goals, care providers often found themselves turning to the use of dedicated catering staff to avoid precious care staff time being taken up by secondary duties.
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A Tailor Made Team
As dedicated catering and kitchen staff, these team members need to be trained and experienced in several key areas of nutritional support to ensure a positive dining experience for residents. Some of the areas their training should touch on include:
In the aftermath of the Commission, the industry has begun to place greater value in having expert catering staff to give their residents a positive dining experience. To match these expectations, tertiary education providers such as TAFEs across the country have begun to expand on their catering offerings to provide information and training specifically relevant to aged care, such as the importance and methods of preparing texture modified foods and diets in aged care food menus. Appropriately trained and experienced staff could offer a range of advantages, including:
Of course, with all of these stringent requirements in mind, we understand that this raises the possibility of staffing issues for aged care administrators. Ensuring that new catering hires are sufficiently trained, experienced, and qualified places additional continuous work – and cost – on facility administrations, and makes the option of turning to outsourced catering more appealing.
Open for Service
A good catering solution starts with a good team, and Cater Care is more than equipped to provide you with the expert manpower and support to provide nothing but the highest quality care to your residents. Staff shortages will never be a problem thanks to your facility being assigned a dedicated team with an attached pool of flex staff to account for any shortages. Backed by our uniquely interactive and extensive training programme and practicing our values of Care, Pride, and Community, our staff are perfect to become the spirited backbone of your aged care community.
If you’re interested in ensuring that your catering is handled by experienced professionals who take pride in the food they prepare, get in touch with Jonathan from your local Cater Care Business Development Team today.
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Jonathan Storer
Client Development Manager – Cater Care
Ph: 0424 190 566
jonathan.storer@catercare.com.au
