Measuring Food Service Satisfaction and Evidence-Based Strategies to Achieve Improvement

"Satisfaction of residents, their families and food service staff is critical if we are serious about making a difference to food and nutrition in aged care."

— Professor Michelle Miller

In Australia, almost 200,000 older adults live in over 2,500 residential aged care homes where they are almost entirely dependent on the organisational food service to meet their food and nutrition needs.

Factors associated with ageing, such as loss of taste and smell, can decrease food consumption and ultimately lead to malnutrition which is associated with poor health outcomes and decline in quality of life. Risk of malnutrition is compounded by poor satisfaction, with those who are dissatisfied with the food service up to 20 times more likely to be at risk of malnutrition.

In their 2021 final report, the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety made 148 recommendations for reform with food and nutrition in residential aged care being one of the top four priorities for urgent action.

The Flinders University Aged Care Food and Nutrition Research team have developed a world first toolkit of validated Food Service Satisfaction Questionnaires for use by key stakeholders in residential aged care; the residents, their families and the food service staff. The team has also developed a suite of evidence-based strategies that can be implemented to facilitate improvements in food and nutrition in residential aged care.

Goal

To develop a toolkit of evidence-based, valid and reliable questionnaires to measure the food service satisfaction of stakeholders in residential aged care.

Aims

To provide residential aged care homes with access to questionnaires to measure the food service satisfaction of residents, their families and their food service staff.
To provide residential aged care homes with training and other materials to support their use of the food service satisfaction questionnaires.
To support residential aged care homes to improve the food service satisfaction of stakeholders through the provision of targeted, evidence based strategies.
To assist residential aged care homes to meet accreditation requirements for consumer feedback.
To improve care for the residents, their families and the food service workforce in aged care.
To provide those undertaking relevant research in residential aged care food and nutrition with appropriately designed and rigorously tested measurement tools.