practical living
Lighting the way
Lantern Project aims to shine a
light on nutrition in aged care.
Cherie Hugo interviewed
by Conor Burke
T
o improve the quality of life of older Australians through
good food and nutrition.”
This is the vision of the Lantern Project, an aged care-
focused collaboration concentrated on the dining experience,
legal and food quality issues, as well as food activities that
connect the generations.
Founded in 2013 by Dr Cherie Hugo (an accredited practising
dietitian and director of My Nutrition Clinic, which currently
consults in aged care homes) the project aims to “shine the light
on the issue of food in aged care, using good old fashioned fresh,
local produce, utilising the wisdom of our elder residents”.
Hugo and the Lantern Project were key in the recent research
into the cost of feeding aged care residents. They found that the
average total spend on catering consumables (including cutlery,
crockery, supplements, paper goods) was $8 per resident per
day: less than aged care food budgets internationally (US, UK and
Canada), and less than community-dwelling older adults ($17.25)
and, even more surprisingly, 136 per cent less than for Australian
corrective services.
22 agedcareinsite.com.au
Aged Care Insite sat down with Hugo to discuss the state of
nutrition in aged care.
I came across the Lantern Project through your work on the
paper, ‘What Does it Cost to Feed Aged Care Residents in
Australia?’ Were some of the findings about the costings in
aged care as shocking to you as they were to everyone else?
They weren’t completely shocking. I had a feeling the figures
weren’t particularly high at some of the aged care homes, and
that formed the basis of the paper.
We wanted to explore, understand and then publish what is the
current state of play. So the paper’s really just a baseline because it
hadn’t been published before.
Can you run us through the method, the study, and what
you found?
The data itself is part of ongoing work gathered by StewartBrown,
an accountancy firm that publishes the data multiple times a year
across Australian aged care homes. So we were really partnering
and working with them and their data, but looking more at the
food-specific data – they gather it in all aspects of aged care.
StewartBrown broke down the food data further for us to look at
and document the trends.
Over the period we looked at, the average raw food spend –
that doesn’t include crockery, cutlery or staffing – came to $6.08
per resident per day in Australia as an average. Obviously there are
homes that spend a lot more than that, but there are also homes
that spend less than that.
What was most interesting to me as a dietitian was then looking
at that trend. So we found that over a 12-month period during