Healthcare Areas

In a survey conducted in a 2019 survey, the HQCA asked residents living in designated supportive living:

Is the food here tasty?

Residents could choose “Yes, always / Yes, sometimes / No, hardly ever / No, never”

Experiences with food, including things like quality, variety, and dietary needs, are important to a resident’s experience. Better food ratings are found to be associated with more positive overall experience with care and services from the resident’s perspective.

There are a number of factors providers and leaders can consider to better understand and improve resident experiences with the tastiness of food. Before taking action, consider the following:

• What is important to residents when it comes to the taste of the food provided?
• How might you approach identifying and prioritizing improvements to the taste of the food? How might you involve residents and loved ones in that discussion?
• How might resident experiences with the taste of the food differ from loved ones’ experiences? How are both experiences considered when deciding how to improve the taste of the food?
• How might cultural differences influence resident experience with the taste of food?
• What may be some challenges sites face to preparing tasty meals for residents (e.g., puree diets, other dietary restrictions, cost, etc.)? What can we learn from others doing well in this area?
• Is food being provided by an external provider, or prepared in-house? How might this impact this result?
• How might other aspects of the dining experience affect these results (e.g., food presentation, dishware, napkins, dining environment, etc.)?
• Which Supportive Living Accommodation Standard(s) does this question help inform, if any?
• Which Continuing Care Health Service Standard(s) does this question help inform, if any?
• Who should be involved in discussions to improve these results? How could residents and/or family members be engaged to develop solutions? What other collaboration might be required to make improvements in this area?

For information about the HQCA’s designated supportive living resident experience survey, please visit the HQCA website.

The Health Quality Council of Alberta uses the Alberta Quality Matrix for Health as a way of organizing information and thinking around the complexity of the healthcare system. This measure can be used as input to assess supported living’s performance in this dimension of quality: Acceptability.

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