Any Residential Care Facility for the Elderly (RCFE) provides a wide range of care for its residents, but perhaps none is as ever-present and important as keeping them fed. Providing nourishing, healthy food to the people at your facility goes a long way toward preserving their wellbeing and improving their quality of life. At the same time, a healthy diet can help minimize symptoms and complications from health conditions.
All told, food is a big part of what you offer. But if your residents have dietary restrictions — and particularly allergies — things get more complicated.
Fortunately, there are a few steps your RCFE can take to protect your residents and minimize risks here.
Clarify Food Needs
Make it a point to have every resident (or their family) explain their allergies and any other dietary restrictions on your intake documentation.
To ensure your team keeps up with residents’ changing needs, solicit new input on a regular cadence, too. You might have a dietary restriction form that all of your residents fill out annually, for example.
Then, you need to make sure that information is communicated to both your kitchen staff and any team members directly providing care for that resident. Making a chart of dietary restrictions that you hang in the kitchen can help here.
Implement Labeling Procedures
When residents have their choice of food options, make sure things are clearly labeled.
While some restaurants use icons (e.g., a leaf to indicate a vegan meal), RCFEs should make things as clear as possible. You might, for example, label a dish “Gluten-Free Beef Lasagna.” Not only does that indicate that this dish is safe for your residents who don’t eat gluten, but it also alerts vegetarian residents that the lasagna contains meat.
In short, be as clear and descriptive as possible whenever creating food labels.
Evaluate Your Meal Planning
Depending on the complexity and variety of your residents’ food needs, it may make sense to develop meal plans for certain categories. Many RCFEs, for example, compile recipes to use for residents who are:
- Allergic to nuts
- Allergic to shellfish
- Diabetic
- Halal
- Kosher
- Lactose-intolerant
- Low-sodium
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Based on the information you get from residents on their allergens and dietary restrictions, work with your kitchen staff to determine when specialized meal plans may need to be implemented.
Train Your Team
To keep your residents with allergies safe, it’s absolutely critical that anyone working in your kitchen knows how to avoid cross-contamination.
You may want to designate a specific area of the kitchen to be fully free from allergens like nuts, milk, gluten, and shellfish. Stock that area with its own utensils, cooking implements, cutting boards, etc. This makes it much easier for your team to avoid accidentally transferring an allergen to the food of a resident who can’t tolerate it.
You should also host periodic training for your kitchen staff to learn how to protect residents with food allergies. Food Allergy Research & Education, a nonprofit, offers on-demand training you can use, for example.
To recap, protecting your residents with allergies and dietary restrictions starts with learning about their specifications and communicating that to your staff. Then, enable your team to comply with specialized meal planning, separated food prep areas, and regular training.
As you focus on keeping your residents safe, we can focus on protecting your RCFE. For the insurance you need — including liability coverage if a food issue does arise — contact us at (805) 413-5668.
