Last updated on June 15th, 2023
It’s November, which means it’s National Family Caregivers Month. This year, we wanted to thank all of the people out there who have taken on the role of caregiver for a family member or friend. Your efforts do not go unnoticed.
We know it’s not always easy being a family caregiver. There are times when you may have to put your work or social life on hold to care for your loved one. There also may come a time where you realize that you can’t do it all. When family care is no longer an option, and you start considering an assisted living or long-term care community, you’ll need to do a lot of research to make sure you find the right fit for your loved one.
One of the aspects you should look at closely for every community you evaluate is their dining program. A great dining program can make a big difference in your family member’s quality of life once they transition to long-term care.
What is Person-centered Care?
One of the first things you should find out about potential new communities for your loved one is if the staff follows a person-centered care model. Person-centered care puts the resident first, not the staff. What does the resident need and want? What is the resident interested in? What are their favorite and least favorite foods?
Person-centered care means that residents are actively making decisions about their daily lives.
The More Choices the Better
When it comes to the dining program, communities focused on person-centered care usually offer residents plenty of choices about when, where, and how they eat.
Many dining programs at long-term care communities today are shifting away from a structured, institutionalized dining model where every resident eats the same meal at the same time in the same place.
Look for a dining program that offers residents choices and makes mealtimes enjoyable. Food can lift a person’s mood, increase socialization, and help a community feel more like home. A flexible food program also helps residents feel empowered about themselves and their health.
Here are some questions to ask communities you’re evaluating:
Can residents sit wherever they want and with whoever they want during mealtime?
Just like you sometimes prefer to go to a restaurant and sometimes prefer to get take-out at home, senior living community residents also have preferences about where they want to eat from day-to-day. Sometimes they may want to eat in their rooms, and sometimes they may want to join their friends in the dining room. Either way, a person-centered care community should offer the choice and not force residents to eat in the dining room every day at a specific time.
Are there food options 24/7?
The community’s kitchen doesn’t need to be open all day and night, but a good dining program should provide food to residents 24/7. Some people may like to eat earlier or later than the set mealtimes, and they shouldn’t have to go hungry because of it. Whether the community offers in-room kitchenettes with easy-to-make snacks or grab-and-go food tables that residents can visit at 3 am, there needs to be an option for food at all hours of the day.
Do you take residents’ food preferences into account when creating menus?
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services encourages long-term care communities to liberalize resident diets when possible to promote person-centered care. Liberalized diets aim to provide residents with the food they prefer, while still keeping them healthy.
Does the community offer restaurant-style dining?
Restaurant-style dining has become a trend across senior living communities in the past few years. Residents can order from a menu just like at a restaurant, and the food is made to order. This is just another way communities can deinstitutionalize their dining program and cater to residents’ needs and wants.
How Senior Living Communities Can Individualize Their Dining Programs
If you’re a staff member at a community and you’re reading this, think about how individualized your dining program is. As individualized, person-centered care becomes more of the norm in senior living communities, caregivers will value a dining program that pays attention to their loved one’s preferences.
You can individualize your program by asking what your residents want. What are they happy with? What are they unhappy with? What would they like to see more of?
In order to have an individualized program, you need to involve the people you’re creating it for. Work with residents and caregivers to understand their food and mealtime preferences.
At Culinary Services Group, we sit down with each resident at the communities we work with and fill out a food preferences form with them that asks questions about what they like and what they don’t. We ask about general, regional, and cultural food preferences. Then, after collecting this information from each resident, we use the data to fully customize a menu for your community. Besides learning their food preferences, this process also helps us introduce ourselves to each resident and start building a relationship when we begin working with a new community.
Implementing a brand new individualized dining program can be difficult if you haven’t done it yet, but we’re here to help. Our team at Culinary Services Group can assist you in promoting person-centered care and individualized dining. Contact us here.
