From my many years of experience in the Health & Aged Care Industry the article below from the Australian Ageing Agenda (Cherie Hugo) is an issue that continually falls by the wayside when evaluating the Hotel Service areas of Health & Aged Care.
In many cases the additional complexity of nutritional requirements, and food safety equipment and monitoring has never been funded separately, so that means that these cost are also diminishing the money required to provide the quality of nutrition required of someone who is frail, sick or both.
Every nursing home resident deserves to get food that that is nutritional, looks and tastes like food (most should now be preparing moulded foods).
All kitchens also need to have the right equipment that allows them to prepare food both safely and economically.
We do need to take care with Benchmarking is it’s not seen as the “be all” as all sites are different and you need to be comparing “apples with apples”.
I spent two years a few years ago benchmarking some 40+ different sites with different bed numbers and a lot of additional time was spent on go back and forward trying as best as possible to get comparatives fairly equal, and even then I could not be 100% positive.
Benchmarking is just a basic comparative model that does provide some direction if done correctly (you cannot be certain that everything in the financials are the same).
The food budgets of Australian residential aged care facilities are dwindling while money spent on nutritional supplements is increasing, according to new analysis.
The paper published last week in Nutrition & Dietetics is based on surveys from 817 residential facilities representing about a third of operational places nationally and reports on care costs related to catering.
The research investigated the average food spend and trends of aged care facilities from 1 July 2014 to 30 June 2016 via survey data collected by aged care accountancy Stewart Brown.
It found that the average spend per resident per day on catering costs – including food, cooking ingredients, supplements, meal replacements and items such as crockery, cutlery and paper goods – increased from $7.52 to $8.00 from the first year to the next.
However, the average daily spend on food fell by 5 per cent from $6.39 to $6.08 per resident per day over the period, according to the 56 per cent of facilities that provided a break-down of catering costs.
At these facilities there was also a 128-per-cent increase (50 cents) in spending on oral nutrition supplements and food replacements per resident per day over the period, along with an 11-cent (28 per cent) increase in costs related to other consumables, such as crockery, cutlery and paper products.
Cherie Hugo
The trend showing a decrease in spending on raw food and an increase in spending on supplements is a concern, said lead investigator Cherie Hugo, Bond University PhD candidate and aged care dietitian.
“We cannot cut the food budget anymore because it is a false economy,” Ms Hugo told Australian Ageing Agenda.
“You end up spending more on supplements, which don’t improve quality of life for your residents. And the cost of that small cut ends up being very expensive in terms of the flow-on effects such as wounds, falls and hospital readmission,” she said.
Keep in mind that meals are more than just nutrition too – they provide an opportunity to communicate, to trigger memories, to savour flavours, to engage in life and contribute to quality of life. Supplements can’t replace the rich role of food and dining experiences in the lives of our residents but figures suggest this may be happening.
This paper provides a baseline to check in at future times and compare trends. Thanks Australian Ageing Agenda for sharing the research. There’s a number of papers about to be submitted for publication that extends on this topic to demonstrate the economic value of nutrition in aged care. I look forward to sharing them with you to further improve the mealtime experience and nutrition outcomes for residents in the aged care setting.
Warm regards, Cherie
Ms Hugo, who is investigating aged care nutrition for her PhD, said she was concerned supplements were being used rather than addressing the underlying cause of someone’s malnutrition or weight loss, which could be related to the food options or their oral health.
Ms Hugo said the paper offered a baseline to monitor trends over the coming years.
Sean Rooney
In response to the findings, Leading Age Services Australia CEO Sean Rooney said aged care providers were required by the accreditation standards to demonstrate that catering services were provided in a way that ensured meal preferences, nutritional needs and special requirements of residents were met.
He said weight gain and loss were measured and responded to routinely and supplements were used to complement the nutritional intake of an elderly person in residential aged care when required.
“In the context of mounting fiscal pressures in the delivery of aged care services, we are seeing many providers combining their resources or small providers newly acquired by larger aged care groups having increased buying power that would potentially lower a provider’s spend on food,” Mr Rooney told AAA.