Feature
Nutritional care staff work to ensure quality meals
Thursday November 15, 2007
If you talk to anyone working in a nutritional care department at an OMNI long-term care home, they’ll tell you mealtimes are the one thing residents place priority on more than anything else.

Residents expect their meals prepared with quality ingredients and to be pleasing to the palate. Nutritional care departments at OMNI long-term care homes go to great measures to ensure residents get the meals they want and deserve.

One way this is achieved is through residents’ councils.

Mealtimes are often at the forefront of the agenda at council meetings. Nutritional care staff members take notes at these meetings so they can get a better handle on what residents want on the menu, as well as to ease concerns and resolve issues.

Willows Estate — as with other OMNI homes — offers two taste-test panels each year, so residents can get a preview of the autumn/winter and spring/summer menus.

Residents and staff members sample proposed menu items at these events and provide feedback to the nutritional care team at the Aurora long-term care home.

The Willows’ nutritional care manager (NCM) Gary Rose says this formula has worked well for the department.

“The largest success is that at Willows, the residents are happy with the meals,” he says. “That’s a big success. At one time there were problems with the meals, but now everything is just wonderful.”

Staff at Rosebridge Manor likes to involve its residents when it comes to mealtime programming.

Once per month, residents at the Jasper long-term care home get a chance to prepare their own meals as part of the pizza-making program — and it’s something they take very seriously, says NCM Kori Bigelow.

Residents help assemble pizzas by adding meats, veggies, sauce and cheese to proofed pizza dough, and then staff members toss the pies in the oven for them.

The pizza-making program is so popular is at Rosebridge that when residents’ choice nights — mealtimes where residents pick what they want to eat — pizza is usually at the top of the list.

“They ask for pizza because they’re involved,” says Bigelow.

But the tasks undertaken by NCMs equate to more than just providing residents with good food.

In many cases, mealtime programming requires nutritional care staff to make sure they keep up to date on the health needs of residents. This means staff has to be on the lookout for foods individuals need, as well as those foods which they must avoid.

Such is the case at Pleasant Meadow Manor, explains the Norwood home’s NCM Judy Schell.

Two residents at the home receive kidney dialysis, and are therefore on renal diets. These diets limit a person’s intake of potassium, sodium and phosphorus.

“The challenges with that are to make sure that they get their proper foods, because it’s a little different from the regular diets,” says Schell. “(We have to) make sure that the nurses aren’t giving them the wrong thing when we make up the plates at this end, and to make sure they get what they’re supposed to have.”

With so many aspects, it’s easy to see why nutritional care is an excellent career option for someone with a knack for multitasking.