Choice on the menu: Increasing meal choice for people living in residential aged care, a pilot study

For residents in residential aged care (RAC), opportunities to make decisions about their meals are often limited. Increasing choice for residents requires significant changes to be made to the foodservice system to deliver nutritionally adequate, timely and enjoyable meals to residents. The pilot project aimed to understand the effect of increasing choice in meals on residents, staff and the foodservice system.

A pragmatic action research approach was used to collaboratively design and evaluate an altered a foodservice system that increased choice, enabling residents to place their order at the mealtime and choose from a menu of seven hot meal options for lunch and dinner. Outcome measures were measured pre- and post-implementation and included food waste, resident satisfaction and foodservice costs.

Resident satisfaction measured on a 5-point Likert scale improved between pre- (3.60 ± 1.09) and post- (4.57 ± 0.49) measurements, whereas production waste increased (pre-55g, post-90 g) and foodservice costs increased (pre-$9.20-$11.14 per resident per day, post-$11.01-$12.15 per resident per day). Compared to the standard cook serve meal, consumption of protein foods increased marginally (+5 g), vegetable consumption increased (+11 g) and carbohydrate consumption decreased (-38 g) for meals consumed from the intervention menu.

Increasing choice can have a positive impact of resident satisfaction; however, further work is needed to investigate how production waste and costs can be addressed.