Food services at Windsor Regional Hospital’s Ouellette campus in Ontario, Canada, will switch to a room-service-style model like and leave the basic two-choice model behind, according to an article on the Windsor Star website.
“Hospital food used to be on par with airplane food,” hospital CEO David Musyj said in the article. “Now it’s taken a step up.”
Seven years ago, when Windsor Regional Hospital’s Met campus used a conveyor belt with workers plopping portions onto trays with almost no opportunity for patients to choose, the patient satisfaction level was in the 40 percent range, Musyj said. That’s about where the satisfaction rating is currently at Ouellette.
But Met’s room service system raides patient satisfaction as high as 90 percent, he said.
The room service-style system adds a bit to the labor cost, said Melissa Alexander-Dionisi, manager of patient food services and clinical nutrition, but the extra labor is worth it.
The heart of the operation is the call center where dietary assistants take phone orders from either patients or family members who can call in from their homes. The assistants use touch screens to tally up carbs, ensuring that patients with special diets are eating what they should.
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