PORT ANGELES — They will select meals from a menu, call in their orders from bed, be served by a server and eat from real plates with real cutlery.
Sound like a hotel?
It’s Olympic Medical Center’s new food service program for patients, modeled after hotel room service and slated to start by March 2006.
The motto for the newly named Hospitality Department: “Serving people, not food — Let the phones ring!”
Graciela Harris, the hospital’s director of nutrition services, outlined the program Wednesday at the hospital commissioners’ regular semimonthly meeting.
Patients’ meals will be cooked in an expanded hospital kitchen built as part of a $45 million, three-year capital project that also will include a new hospital cafeteria.
Patients will call in their orders to a newly-built call-center. Meals will be served by workers trained in proper table-side etiquette, Harris said.
The hospital also will hire a 0.8 full-time-equivalent dinner cook and two new full-time service workers.
Food service operations have grown at least 12 percent yearly without any increase in staff, Harris said.
Less-wasteful program
She did not have a cost estimate but said she expects the increased expenses would be covered by savings from a less-wasteful program.
She said the hospital now loses an average of $2,811 a month on “second trays,” or food rejected by patients.
That works out to 18 percent of all meals now served.
