Restaurant Style Service in the Long Term Care Setting:: The Customer Service Focus of the Future

Abstract

Customer feedback in a long term care and rehabilitation facility revealed dissatisfaction with existing meal service. A market survey targeting families and residents, identified dissatisfaction in variety, appearance, taste, temperature and portion size. Traditional long term care selective menu choices are made a week ahead of mealtime. As the resident population shifted toward shorter term rehabilitation with rapid health improvements, this style of menu became cumbersome and did not meet their residents’ current health needs and desires. The long term residents frequently forgot their choices leading to frustration at meal-time. This impacted on production, as often items were unavailable due to the pre-planned production schedule. To assure availability of resident choices, reduce production problems, and keep food and labor cost in control, a production and service system was implemented. It was based on a design that allowed residents to make choices from the selective menu at table side. The system included production forecasting and documentation of over and under production. Creatively redesigning employee work assignments in a non-traditional fashion, resulted in table side wait staff working within the existing labor budget. Upon program implementation, a resident satisfaction Continuous Quality Indicator tool was initiated to monitor the on-going success of the restaurant style meal service. The results showed a consistently high satisfaction with this type of service. By taking a customer service perspective, we were able to modify meal service within existing budget constraints and meet the needs of the ever changing long term care client.