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Cooking
in hospitals will decline in the future while heating and serving
prepared food increases. And the real action will be outside the
hospitals.
People studying the demographics of
the province see an aging population and therefore a need for
long-term care, peaking somewhere between 2005-2010, apart from
mental health care facilities.
Hospital beds will be replaced by
those in residential care facilities, nursing homes and homes for
the aged. Also, there will be more supportive housing facilities
that are like a combination apartment building and nursing home,
where residents have their own living quarters but are close to
nursing care if they need it. Maintenance of the aged and infirm in
their own homes will also increase.
The HSRC is scheduled to release a
report this spring, called Change and Transitions. This will provide
a framework for planning and spending related to long term care,
home care, sub-acute care (less intensive than a hospital but more
intensive than a nursing home) and mental health services.
The report will proclaim how much
money is available for about 16,000 new long-term beds, and where
they will be located. About two thirds of these will be funded
immediately.
The good news for the healthcare
food service industry is that all the people in the various
long-term facilities will have to be fed the special food that
companies have developed for hospitals.
Toronto-based distributor Serca
Foodservice Inc. anticipated this and has concentrated its
healthcare energy in the long-term market. It has contracts with
about two dozen long-term care chains, and uses a special computer
program for dealing with such institutions, called Serca Synergy.
Campbell's Healthcare Foodservice is
now supplying hospitals and nursing homes with its Trépurée line
of texture altered food for takeout service. Family members or other
caregivers can come pick up the food for people who are being cared
for at home.
The Campbell's Soup Company division
also produces Heat and Serve entrées, a line of soft-food meals
designed to be eaten with a single utensil. Many long-term patients
can feed themselves if the process is kept simple, and being able to
eat with a single utensil definitely simplifies things.
A note to the people who decide what
food to buy; maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to have older people
tasting it. Dietitians, doctors and other staff who have a say on
what to be purchased, tend to turn up their noses at things that
older people actually like, points out Toronto food consultant
Alison Miner. The tastes of senior citizens go back to their
childhood. "They like parsnips, turnips and all root
vegetables," says Miner. "They're not fond of broccoli".
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