As someone who has worked in hospital food service in the US, I’m really getting a kick out of these replies.
Food service jobs suck anyway, hospital food service sucks ten times more, which is why it tends to pay better. Not nearly enough, but better.
Aside from dealing with other employees (really nurses more than anyone else) who throw a tantrum every time you do your job and give them an answer they don’t want to hear, patients are invariably in a bad mood to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, it comes with the territory and if anyone has a good reason to be unhappy, it’s someone in the hospital. I always did my best to try and help patients. But your day consists of constantly being worn down by everyone around you, and the department is invariably embattled. Here’s two really dirty secrets about food:
-
There is no such thing as “healthy” food. Not in a universal sense. What’s healthy for one person is something someone else really shouldn’t be eating. This one got to me every time. “Just get her/him something healthy, like fruit.” Excuse me, but the patient is on a carbohydrate restricted diet ordered by the physician, and they’ve already called for what amounts to 17 carb exchanges (I am prohibited by law and hospital policy from contraindicating these orders).
-
You can’t please everyone to save your life. You can have people sample seventeen different versions of the same product and the evaluations will be all over the board. It’s absolutely hopeless. In certain regions, people simply aren’t going to eat anything they don’t recognize. I’ve had patients tell me that our food was way too fancy for them, referring to our lasagna, which is good, but nowhere near great.
These two things mean that it’s extremely hard to retain motivated staff. Turnover is high, and the staff that stay do so only because they’ve become inured and unreceptive. It’s a survival mechanism.
But, you want to know what the best part of my day was? Interacting with patients and trying to find some way to make their day a little better- which is why I left. The first thing that gets cut when budgets are slashed are ancillaries, and no one seems to understand that you only get what you pay for. There are laws that require a certain nurse to patient ratio- there are no laws that require you have enough staff to feed patients. The industry standard wait time for a hospital with 200 to 300 bed capacity is 45 minutes to an hour. The reason is that you literally will have one, on a good day two, tray aides (who will also be responsible for preparing some of the food). Sometimes you have one person in charge of a whole ward or unit, both preparing food and delivering it. Meanwhile staff on the units ran us ragged because the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. We’d end up duplicating a lot of work and wasting a ton of food.
God, the waste… it was unholy.
Anyway, just thought I’d give you a little inside baseball.
