FH1117

SEGMENT REPORT
CANADIAN
HOSPITALS
outsource
30%
of their
food prep,
LTCs
outsource
14.2%
and
13.1%
of
RETIREMENT
HOMES
contract out their
foodservice
Hospitals
Hospitals are a category unto themselves
for their short-term engagement
with their “clients” and the exclusively
publicly funded model that supports
them. Hospital food — the butt of
jokes everywhere — suffers a challenging
reputation, say those in its
defense, mostly because of the financial
constraints that check it. Every hospital
sets its own food budget, since health
ministries don’t give hospitals cost
guidelines. The North York General
Hospital in Toronto, for example, spent
$11.51 for food each day, per patient,
in 2014/15.
“Foodservice is the hospital department
that gets squeezed first because
it’s not thought important to the clinical
experience,” says McKay. Too often,
hospital food is conceptualized as
hospitality rather than medical treatment
or an essential for good health.
Management attempting to cut dollars
from their budgets will often hone in
on foodservice.
“The culture of food in institutions
is that food is an irritating necessity,”
agrees Joshna Maharaj, a chef and food
activist from Toronto. “Foodservice is
generally lumped in with maintenance
and housekeeping. It should be much
closer to patient care.”
“No one expects food in public
institutions to be gourmet,” says
the commentary in the Food in
Institutional Settings in Ontario: Health
Equity Perspectives report, prepared
by the Wellesley Institute in July 2017.
“However, we should expect it to be
nutritionally adequate, socially and
culturally acceptable and safe.”
But studies have found patients
often eat less than half of the food on
their meal trays. “Making improvements
to the delivery method and
timing of meals, focusing on culturally
appropriate food, and to the meal
environments, could improve patient
dietary intake,” the Toronto-based
Wellesley Institute report concludes.
But it’s essential, says Maharaj, that
funding gets increased to facilitate this.
“[The industry]did a ton of work and
found paths through in really exciting
ways, but everything comes back
to whether the ministry would invest,
because there’s no way around that. We
need money to make any changes in
hospital food.”
Long-Term Care Homes
Excluding Quebec, approximately
143,000 people live in nursing homes
in Canada, some 80,000 of them in
Ontario. More than 90 per cent of
residents are over the age of 65. Still,
these people are not sick. They’re well
enough to be on their own for extended
periods of time; their complex
health conditions and support needs
aren’t dire enough to require hospitalization,
but neither can they be met in
the community or at home.
Their average stay in an LTC home
is three or four years — the last three
or four years of their lives. Here, says
the Long-Term Care Homes Act, residents
get to live in dignity while having
their physical, psychological, social,
spiritual and cultural needs met.
Their dietary needs, one might
argue, are another matter. Typically,
LTC homes are subsidized by the
provincial government. That means
residents pay only partly out of pocket.
This past summer, Ontario gifted the
province’s 77,000 nursing homes a
financial injection that bumped the
$8.33 daily allowance for residents to
$9 (still less than the
$9.73 that Ontario
inmates get).
“It’s not enough,”
says Maharaj. And it’s
why lots of LTC homes
serve cheaper protein
foods and fewer fresh
fruits and vegetables
— and are still unable
to meet residents’
special dietary needs,
says the Food in
Institutional Settings
in Ontario report.
That makes frozen and
canned vegetables, fruits and meats
mainstays at these facilities.
Retirement Homes
Retirement homes are arguably the
most autonomous, well-funded
and comfortable of the healthcare
foodservice lot. They are also,
says Geoff Wilson, a principal with
Toronto’s fsStrategy Inc., “the foodservice
category where there’s the most
evolution, innovation and movement.”
That’s because these institutions are
universally privately funded, which
means residents foot the entire bill.
It’s a tiered system of both quality and
expense. Across Canada, monthly fees
for retirement-home suites range from
$1,453 to $3,204, on average. But some
accommodations are much pricier. A
one-bedroom independent-living suite
in London, Ont., costs $5,800 a month
and a two-bedroom in Vancouver is
$7,695. The varying fee is a function
of lots of things, including the size and
location of the accommodations, the
number of amenities and the quality
of food.
“The retirement-home industry
has become extremely competitive
and one of the big selling points is
the food,” says Wilson. You bet, says
Richard Bailey, Business Development
manager in healthcare seniors living
at Centennial Foodservice, based in
Calgary. “Food is everything in these
homes — that’s all these seniors talk
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44 FOODSERVICE AND HOSPITALITY NOVEMBER 2017 FOODSERVICEANDHOSPITALITY.COM