So this week I had a rotation in the kitchen at Memorial University Medical Center! I enjoyed it overall, minus the 1 hour commute (plus however much time for traffic) each way every day. That can really wear you out!
Me with my preceptors, Jeffery Quasha and Jessica Herbert.
I arrived at 8 on Monday and attended the daily morning meeting. They are having a big new patient menu rollout new week so there was lots of last minute stuff to be done before all of the new menus come out next week. After the meeting, Jessica took me on a tour of the hospital and told me about their different areas that they work with, including a coffee shop and a grab and go place within the hospital, the doctor lounge, as well as the main hospital cafeteria. After doing a tour, I helped with catering platters. In addition to doing all of the food for the hospital, the main chefs do catering for the hospital. This primarily occurs when administrators within the hospital have meetings. Sometimes the catering is more simple, with just a box lunch for 5, and other times it’s fancy and for a whole group of important people that could total 25 or 100. After working on catering I went to talk to patients with Jessica. It was pretty cool. We just went into the rooms on the floor that she was assigned to and asked patients what their experience with the food had been like since they had been there and if the service had been good. If that had any comments, they were noted. I just observed the first day of seeing patients.
This was a dessert tray for catering. I got to help with part of it.
These were the simple boxed lunches for another catering.
This week at Memorial was actually a record breaking catering week. So, all of Tuesday was spent working on different catering tasks. I got to help prep some of the food and went on some deliveries.
This was a catering for the hospital administrators done for 10 people. I didn’t help prepare any of the food but I got to go on the delivery. Jessica and I had to go back and get more dressing for the salads though, since the assistant we did the catering for didn’t think there was enough. She was very complimentary though. One thing I got to do that was interesting was go on a special patient visit. There was a patient who was on the pediatric floor and wouldn’t eat. His nurses said he was just down and kind of depressed and refused to eat the food. So, Jeffery asked me if I wanted to come do this visit. He said that when patients refuse to eat, they usually call in the chef to talk to the patient to see if there’s anything they want to eat. After talking with the patient, Jeffery made him a chocolate milkshake, but put some Ensure in it so he was getting some nutrition out of it. I thought that was pretty cool.
I got to help cut up some of the pita chips to be fried as well as prepare the hummus.
I didn’t get to help with this beautiful fruit platter but Jeffery did a great job and it was too pretty to not take a picture of!
One of my jobs was to skewer all of this chicken so it could be cooked for a catering job!
I got to make this massive salad, which could feed about 5 people.
On Wednesday, I was able to do some patient services tasks for food service. One thing I did was a test tray. Jessica and I put in an order for breakfast, then we took it upstairs to the nurse’s station. Then, we asked a nurse to taste test the food that the patient gets, and whoever does it gets a ticket for a free lunch. The food is tested for temperature as well as taste and appearance from the nurse. It’s a good way for nurses to know what is being served, as well as getting an outside perspective on the food. Then, I went with Jackie (in charge of patient services) to taste test the food on the line. This is done daily to make sure that food is up to par. Then I listened to the meeting she had with her CA’s (catering associates…I think). The CA’s are the people who take the food to the rooms. There were some things that had to be discussed regarding taking orders doing the little things to make sure the patients are satisfied. After that, I went and did Tray Accuracy Assessments. This is just taking the trays as they get loaded onto the cart for delivery and assessing the accuracy of the tray in comparison to the ticket. This is randomly done to make sure that trays are being prepared properly before being delivered to the patient. While I was doing Tray Accuracy, I decided that I wanted to go on a delivery as well. So I went with one of the CAs to deliver her food. The trays that we delivered were to the Mother & Baby floor and Pediatric floor. I got to listen for the “keywords” that they say to the patient and what delivering food entails. Little things like sanitizing your hands on the way in and out, opening up the lid to show the patients the food, as well as setting up the table for them. I enjoyed doing that!
A Tray Accuracy Assessment report.
After delivering the food, I was asked to fill out a shadow report on the CA. She did really well so she got a perfect score.
On Thursday, I got to taste test food on the line again and attend the employee meetings. Because the new patient menu is getting started, the morning meetings always involved progress on that. This was the day I spent the entire day working on menus. I wasn’t actually coming up with any of the food. However, there is a menu that is given to the patients. This file a PDF template, so I wasn’t able to make the changes myself, but instead had to strikethrough the old food (most changed, but not all), and add notes that told the person what foods to add. In the whole 8 hours of working, I was able to get through 5 menus. There is a regular menu, then there are alternate diets for patients with issues that are based on the regular menu. Alternate diets include mechanical soft, GI issues, diabetics, cardiac, renal, etc.
Making changes from the spread, one diet at a time.
This was the spread that I had to look at to change the menus in the PDF document.
While this is basically impossible to read, it’s a screen shot of what one day of one menu looked like. I had do this for a total of 21 meals (7 days x 3 times per day) per diet. It takes so long!!
On Friday, after attending the morning meeting, I helped Jessica a little bit with catering, but then I sat down with Jeffery and he went over financial stuff with me. It is truely amazing what it takes to run quantity food service, including the labor and food orders and all of that kind of stuff! After going over that I did a little bit more menu stuff, but this time it was putting the menu into an excel document that was going to be made into a booklet for the CAs to take with them to rooms. It would have one meal for one day with all of the different diet menus on it. Most of the time the menus are sorted by diet, but having it sorted by day would allow the CAs to not have to flip around. Then I had lunch with everyone, as usual, then went over my evaluation with Jessica.
I enjoyed Memorial and I have so much respect for foodservice and the hard hours all of these people put in to make it happen!
This was a beautiful sunrise around 6:30am that I got to see on the way to Memorial! (Not nutrition related, but it was too pretty to not share!)