Meal Rounding Quality In Health Care

During these past weeks I had the opportunity of participating in different methods and tools to assess the nutrition department’s quality in food and service, the staff’s performance and global survey. Morrison Healthcare is in charge of providing nutrition services to the patients at College Medical Center (CMC), their primary objective is to provide quality nutrition related services to patients. Meal rounding gathers information from the patient’s perspective which helps gather information to indentify strong and weak areas in the quality of the food and service. The catering associate’s (CA) receive various accuracy evaluations of performance and knowledge, if the outcomes are not very favorable then an action plan is set in motion to

CA’s accuracy is reviewed via a shadow report and tray accuracy test that should be performed spontaneously during a normal work day at least once every three months. Once tray line starts a supervisor will use a form that will evaluate the accuracy of the CA as they build each tray. All items must be adequate to the patient’s diet, restrictions, food modifications and food choices if applicable. CAs must score >90% to achieve a satisfactory score which also includes measuring their speed during tray line. This score is obtained by adding the total amount of trays and dividing it by the length of time spent finishing tray line. Another review CAs are given is a shadow report, which requires the supervisor to follow the CA for at least one entire meal delivery service. This is a much more extensive review that inspections the CAs ability to follow procedures such as confidentiality, sanitization, patient identifiers, communication skills, efficiency, accuracy, professionalism and so much more factors assessed to help increase CA’s ability to provide excellent service to the patients. Last but not least, a test tray is added to the Med Surge floor to test for quality. A random diet is assigned to this test tray and the CAs assemble it accordingly and the supervisor is in charge of checking the temperature, appearance, adequacy, timeliness and most importantly taste. A test

This survey was meant to be performed in one day for a minimum of 20 patients in one medical unit. This required us to visit patients who were receiving an oral diet and explained to them the purpose of the survey was, its purpose and if they chose to participate to sign a wavier allowing us to give them the survey and submit the data to the Coordination Center of Nutrition Day in Austria. Due to a low census that day, we did not meet the minimum quota of 20, which required for the survey time frame to be extended until it was completed. Majority of the patients who agreed to participate requested for us to help them fill it out by turning it into a verbal survey. It appeared that the majority of the patient’s responses were favorable; it appeared as if our presence during the survey skewed their responses in attempt to provide and answer that would please us rather than the truth. Preparing and finalizing the data required a lot of time an organizational skills that our Sara, our clinical RD manager was in charge of putting it together. She took it upon her-self to keep asking new admits through the weekend and some days from the following week to meet the minimum of 20