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02.10.2017

How nutrition drives fine dining in private healthcare

Private hospital patients need the right nutrition to promote recovery. Here’s why the key to that is developing menus that offer choice and tempt taste.

Understanding patient priorities

By the time your private patient is ready to think about a meal, the chances are they’ve been through a stressful experience — no matter how streamlined and comfortable you strive to make their stay.

So, they’re looking for the menu to make all the running: they want choices that sound absolutely delicious, enough to tempt even the most capricious and exacting of appetites. They’re taking for granted that everything they’re being offered is carefully calculated to meet their nutritional needs and promote a speedy recovery.

We know from research by The Patients Association in 2016, that the top two patient priorities for in-hospital dining are taste and choice. Added to which, your patients, considering their surroundings, are expecting a five-star dining experience at their bedside.

And they’re looking to you to provide that.

Our accredited dietitians are a key part of our in-hospital patient dining team, invisibly underpinning the wide-ranging menus we offer, so that every mouthful brings your patients closer to wellness.

Catering for taste and choice in a context of recovery

We understand that you can design menus right down to the individual levels of protein and vitamins so that, on paper, it’s a masterpiece of nutrition. But what experience has taught us that none of this matters if your patients don’t eat the resulting food. This is where our dietitians come in…

Of course, they have a professionally-tuned focus on nutrition. They interpret the Government’s standards for catering for vulnerable people, and work to make sure a wide range of food choices are available to different types of patients to promote recovery.

Where our dietitians really make the difference, however, is in the work they do with our development chefs to make sure taste and choice run through every one of our menus. They understand that nutrition is the bedrock on which fine patient dining is built. So they closely follow every stage of the development of one of our five-star dishes to protect the dietetic content, and push the process of creation further, so that the result delights the patient palate.

Creating food patients love

To make sure every one of your private patients has the best choice of tasty dishes possible, our dietitians speak to patients, chefs and staff to get feedback on meals. This helps them to develop and structure our patient dining menus to include options designed to bring pleasure and comfort — as well as health.

For our dietitians, it’s all about getting patients to eat and enjoy. Of course they’ll always keep a watching brief over ingredients to make sure they support patients’ nutritional needs, but they prioritise flavour within these nutritional parameters. And it’s this approach that means we deliver a patient dining experience appropriate for a five-star restaurant.

Want more?

Our white paper, ‘How outsourcing can improve healthcare in private hospitals’, dishes up a hearty portion of information about how we can tempt the taste buds of your most exacting patient. 

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