Supportive staff administration, especially your food serving team, is the keyword in successfully Senior Living (SL), Rehabilitation Centers, and Long Term Care (LTC) communities. Kind Dining® strongly urges that an organized environment creates a comforting sense of a home feeling for residents, eliminating the old institutional appearances and habits. Teaching an adequate food serving team the skills and connections of hospitality to healthcare is imperative to a successfully managed community. Training, along with the empowerment and support for front-line workers, are parts that make a community whole.
People retain the right to respect, value, and honor due to every unique individual regardless of age or infirmity. Your food serving team needs to recognize and attend those rights and be willing to give them freely as they perform their duties in a friendly, familiar way. Kind Dining® teaches how your food serving team can include simple, efficient manners that will make residents happy to see them come through the door. The serving team will enjoy their work as a result. Allowing a resident to make choices, offer opinions, suggestions, and build nurturing relationships benefits everyone. It blossoms social friendships, reduces isolation, loneliness, and depression. Often small adjustments in routine can improve the physical and emotional craving with a seemingly little additional responsibility to your food server.
A Kind Dining® training session for your food serving staff will build communication, trust, and supportive partnerships among serving staff, learning how to help each other and how it benefits residents. They will learn about empowerment, input in scheduled meetings, offering ideas, suggestions, and being a progressive part of the organization. Now is a perfect time to restructure your community from the inside out since COVID -19 has forced changes already. It is a time to recognize the diversity, lifestyles, and personal needs of residents going through many personal changes of their own. Each resident must receive the same level of service regardless of their ability to communicate. It is the food server’s responsibility to evaluate and respond in giving the best service possible to the resident if communication is inadequate.
Ongoing education is the answer to changes in the Senior Living and Long Term Care communities of today. Leave behind the old ways of tolerance and incompetence in foodservice. It is more efficient to educate with training sessions than to terminate food servers who don’t stand up to your company’s goals while moving ahead.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Remember, everyone is unique, valuable, and worthy of respect