Little things make a big difference at mealtimes, says NCM
Feedback from tasting panels and residents' council meetings help meal programming
Tuesday October 16, 2007 -- Deron Hamel
When it comes to mealtime programming at Frost Manor, the Lindsay long-term care home’s nutritional care department looks to residents and staff members for input, says Jean Chilton.

Chilton, Frost Manor’s nutritional care manager (NCM), cites the tasting panels it sets up twice per year as an example of how the department gets a handle on what everyone at the home wants to eat.

Like every OMNI home, Frost Manor has a fall/winter and a spring/summer menu, featuring several food items on each. Residents, staff members and management personnel are chosen to sample food and fill out a questionnaire with their thoughts on the menus.

After the last taste test in May, the nutritional care department met with the panel to discuss the results.

“With that information, I take it back to our NCM meetings with Aimee (Merkely), our nutritional care co-ordinator,” Chilton explains.

Since the last taste-test panel, Chilton says she has learned some new things about residents’ needs when it comes to mealtime programming.

At a recent residents’ council meeting she attended, Chilton learned one resident enjoyed salads. However, the resident found some of the vegetables in the salads difficult to chew.

In response, Chilton told the resident the nutritional care staff would remove the vegetables from her salad that she found difficult to chew.

“She was just so thrilled to think that we would do that, so that she could still have the salads,” says Chilton.

The nutritional care department receives feedback about things other than food, says Chilton. Ambience is also very important to residents, as the department recently found out at the home’s Sunday dinner before Thanksgiving.

To ensure residents had a nice atmosphere for the Thanksgiving Day meal, the linen tablecloth for the dining room table was taken away and cleaned Sunday. Not having the tablecloth for their Sunday dinner did not go unnoticed by residents, says Chilton, who quickly faced a barrage of questions about its whereabouts.

“Little things like that, they do miss them,” she says.

Because the Sunday roast dinners were an integral part of their social life before moving into long-term care, they are something residents hold near and dear to them.

“(These are) the old-fashioned dinners that they would have at home if they were having company, and that’s why they missed the tablecloth,” says Chilton.