TMC: Dining a la Carte

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Hospital food has a long-standing reputation for being less than desirable. Texoma Medical Center’s Food and Nutrition staff, managed by Sodexo, has made big changes to improve that reputation, and they seem to be working.

The new TMC kitchen was designed to accommodate At Your Request—Room Service Dining®, a service similar to one you would find in a hotel. Patients are given a restaurant-style menu with approximately forty-eight entrees and ninety-five side items to choose from. Would you like scrambled eggs for dinner? No problem. The complete menu is available all day.

When patients are ready to eat, they simply place their order by calling the room service operators on their hospital room telephone. The operators are available to take food orders and assist patients with ordering items that are appropriate for their physician-prescribed diet. Patients can place their meal orders between 6:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Family members can assist the patient by phoning in the meal order if the patient does not feel up to ordering.

Technology plays a vital role in making the food service program successful. With the assistance of a software program developed specifically for At Your Request, Food & Nutrition Staff are able to track which patients have ordered a meal, how many calories that patient has ordered, and when the meal was delivered. Nutritional information has been programmed for almost three hundred different food items, from a pack of salt to a chef salad. A barcode for each meal order is scanned throughout the preparation and delivery process in order to notify the computer system where the tray is in the process. These checkpoints also allow the staff to track tray delivery times to see if they are meeting their delivery goal of 45 minutes or less from the time the order was placed.

Improving patient satisfaction was the goal when implementing At Your Request. The program allows patients to order what they want at the time they want it. Patients have very little control over their schedules in the hospital. With At Your Request, they can make their own meal choices at the times they actually feel like eating. Previously, patients had only two meals to choose from, meals were made in assembly line fashion and delivered at specific times during the day, regardless of whether or not the patient was ready to eat. With the new system, patients are eating better because they are able to eat what they want, when they want. Meals are no longer prepared in advance; they are cooked to order, producing a higher quality food item. As a result, there has been a decrease in the amount of food wasted on each tray, which also saves the hospital money.

According to third-party surveys, patient satisfaction has increased dramatically since the implementation of At Your Request. We receive daily comments from patients about how much they enjoy the food. This is certainly an improvement from the old system, and we hope to continue to improve that reputation.

At Your Request: Room Service Dining®
by Melissa Morgan, RD/LD, Sodexo Clinical Nutrition Manager