Strengthened Aged Care Standard 6.1 focuses on working with your residents and in doing so also making continuous improvements to the food service.
As everyone works towards being compliant with the long awaited Strengthened Aged Care Standards, now is a good time to start thinking about how you engage with your residents to ensure adequate choices to provide enjoyable food, drink and dining experiences based on their preferences and needs.
To enable homes to demonstrate this, it is important that residents' preferences for meals, likes and dislikes are fully documented in dietary care plans, and these are regularly reviewed and updated.
Staff should be aware of these individualised care plans and be able to access them in order to provide items in line with residents’ preferences and needs. One area that often is neglected is breakfast preferences. These are often documented when residents arrive at a home and then never reviewed.
A quick review every few months when updating a dietary care plan will ensure residents, particularly those taking breakfast on a tray are receiving their preferred breakfast items. It is important to make sure that all residents are aware of all the available breakfast menu items.
Partnering with your residents as part of menu development is essential to ensure that you are providing meals and beverages based on their wants and needs.
Menu planning should put the residents at the forefront taking into consideration not only their cultural and religious backgrounds but also all the requests and preferences that they have provided through regular food focus meetings and food satisfaction surveys.
Food Solutions recommends running monthly food focus groups and would be happy to provide you with support in running these. A “meeting minutes template” is useful to help you collect the information you need from your residents to plan your menus based on their feedback.
This can then improve resident satisfaction with the meals offered, which in turn results in improved nutrition and health. It is important to ensure that families and next of kins are invited to attend your meetings and that residents and families/NOK are provided with feedback on action points / improvements made to meals and the meal service.
Often noted is that food satisfaction surveys do not provide the information needed to make real improvements.
Consider implementing an evidenced based validated tool that can assist you with making genuine improvements to your food and foodservice based on resident feedback. Food Solutions can recommend a survey and assist you with implementing improvements.
To ensure that your resident dining experience is up to scratch, consider a Mealtime Experience Review.
This review looks at all aspects of the dining experience including the dining environment, assessing the safety, suitability and nutritional adequacy of menu items provided on the day.
This also includes an assessment of assistance provided to residents with eating.
Food Solutions can also provide follow-up training on the dining experience and assist with training for staff in supporting safe and enjoyable mealtimes for people with dysphagia.
Contact the Dietitians and Speech Pathologist at Food Solutions to ensure that your facility is ready for the Strengthened Aged Care Quality standards.
