Page 16 - Nourish.pdf

Resident-Directed Care from Scratch: Action teams learn what elders really want
By Valerie G. Palmieri, JD, NHA Residence Administrator and VP The Madlyn and Leonard Abramsom Center for Jewish Life in Horsham, PA
Satisfaction surveys are the most commonly used method to assess whether residents are pleased with life in their community. From dining room service to bathing, satisfaction surveys provide
a glimpse into what residents value and how well a community honors their preferences. But is this glimpse enough to be true to the principles of resident-directed care?
De ning what residents really want is a vital rst step to resident-directed care, and those wants can only be identi ed by residents themselves. Action teams formed by those residents able to represent the voice of their peers without advancing personal agendas are effective at identifying the key areas of what residents hold dear.
One such team was recently formed at the The Madlyn and Leonard Abramson Center for Jewish Life, a progressive community in Horsham, PA, that practices resident-directed care while demonstrating exceptional clinical outcomes for its 324 nursing-home and 50 assisted living residents. Challenged to meet the discriminating dining requirements of its constituents, the Center assembled a resident action team to rede ne menu and recipe selection. In what was later termed as “breaking the menu,” nursing and assisted-living residents collaborated, discussed, voted, de ned and implemented menu offerings that honor resident preferences while remaining true to kosher dietary standards.
Initially, the need to change directions in menu offerings was de ned by regularly assessing resident satisfaction. Dining scores were less than optimal and previous attempts to improve resident dining by upgrading the menu and enhancing service delivery brought mixed results. Follow-up satisfaction surveys demonstrated modest, if any,
improvement.
The problem? Residents themselves were peripheral to previous improvement attempts. The community’s menu needed more than resident suggestions—it
needed residents to fully create and implement the menu based on their preferences. From there, the resident dining action team was born!
For months, nursing and assisted- living residents participated in an aggressive campaign to overhaul their dining program’s menu selections and recipe format. Residents
were selected to join the dining services action team based on their expressed interest, ability to provide constructive and frank feedback, and willingness to commit to the project from start to nish.
The nursing home’s leadership team was impressed from the start by their residents’ willingness to not only participate, but also to embrace the process—they established rules of order for each meeting, kept meetings on track and consistently accomplished goals set for each gathering. Residents created a menu based on recipes from their original menu offerings, local kosher-style restaurant selections, home-style favorites and the Center Auxiliary’s new cookbook, Timeless; Four Generations of Creative Kosher Cuisine.
In an industry where menus are generally selected for residential
©2008 Action Pact, Inc.
16
www.culturechangenow.com