It ' s well and truly time food is given its place in the hospital hierarchy and treated as a part of the care model in clinical treatment .
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How has it been working together ?
Sally : It ' s been fantastic working with Luke . He hadn ' t worked with dietitians or in healthcare before , so one of the biggest things was communicating the restrictions we have in terms of menu standards . We have a lot of different therapeutic diets – on average , we have about 86 different diets that we have to cater for ! But Luke has been incredibly supportive of this and interested in understanding our environment . Luke just takes on the barriers head on and wants to work together to solve them .
Luke : Chefs can be very difficult creatures , but it would never work if I challenged Sally . It ' s not about my ego as a chef , it ' s all about making the best possible food for the patient , which is great .
Sally , how do you go about the menu development process ?
It ' s quite a long process . We normally start off with a theme or direction that we want to take to Luke and ask for a certain number of recipes , and he comes back with his suggestions . Then , we work with our executive chef to see if Luke ’ s recipes will work from a production point of view , and our clinical food service dietitian to see if the recipes are suitable from a dietary perspective . We ' ll run it through our menu compliance system , and that ' s when we start to go back and forth with Luke to tinker with the recipes until they ’ re right . Luke then tests them again , we do a plate up session and work to make sure the meal arrives to the patient the same way it left the kitchen .
© Dietitian Connection 12 Infuse | October 2022