Dietitian advocates for resident-focused dining experience
Eye contact, conversation and choice help to empower residents, Suzanne Quiring says
Monday May 30, 2011 -- Lisa Bailey
Suzanne Quiring aims to change the culture of the long-term care dining experience.

The registered dietitian from Abbotsford, British Columbia, consults with long-term care homes all over Canada on resident-focused dining.

“My passion is to encourage food managers, dietitians and administrators to rethink how we are doing meal service in the dining room,” says Quiring, who presented at an innovations in dining workshop during this year’s Ontario Long Term Care Association/Ontario Retirement Communities Association convention in Toronto.

“It’s reorganizing the hands on deck with the time that we have to do meal service and make it much more resident-focused,” Quiring says of her concept.

She advocates bringing food to residents, and has developed, with a stainless steel manufacturer, a mobile meal service system in place of the server style or tray service.

Bulk menu items are placed on a cart with heated and non-heated storage, which staff roll into the dining room to provide table-side service to residents.

Quiring says she’s helped approximately 150 long-term care homes and care facilities switch to this style of service over the past 12 years.

Amongst the benefits she lists with this system are hotter food, efficient use of staff time, and individual serving sizes to minimize waste and maximize food cost savings.

Positive interaction between staff members and residents is also enhanced, Quiring says, as there is eye contact, talking and listening, and offering choice.

“Because dietary staff members are out of the four walls of a kitchen or servery and they’re coming up and interacting directly with residents, they get to know the residents themselves, so you have a whole extra side of a care team coming up and talking to residents,” she says.

Quiring says that providing residents with the opportunity to choose what and how much food they’d like to eat is empowering and it supports their independence and autonomy.

“We’re not making any assumptions for residents, we’re giving them the right to have self-determination in the dining room which shows a lot of respect and dignity to residents,” she says.

Quiring says she was inspired to facilitate change as a result of challenges she encountered as a food manager working in long-term care.

She says she wanted to “empower staff to be the solution (to challenges) and be out there” as “they’re the ones who need to interact with residents because if the residents get to know who is making their food and who’s responsible for the food . . . residents then feel they have more ownership as to what’s being served to them every day, every meal.”

Quiring’s concept is based on the philosophy that the resident is at home and, as for anyone at home, has a voice in daily food choices.

For more information on Quiring’s concept and cart system, click here.

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