Phew! This week was insanely busy with a full week of food service/long-term care and a Minnesota wedding! This whole semester has been pretty intense since it’s only 6 weeks long. There’s not a lot of room for error in figuring out what you’re doing! To catch up with my previous experience in food service/long-term care, check out:
DI: Week 32 – Starting Food Service
DI: Week 33 – Food Service and Long-term Care
DI: Week 34 – Halfway Through Food Service and Long-term Care
DI: Week 35 – Week 4 of Food Service/Long-term Care
Here’s what my week looked like:
Monday:
We completed quarterly assessments on more residents and spent a lot of time working on our 4th of July menu. We’re planning the menu and staffing needs for the 4th of July. We planned the menu already: ribs, coleslaw, potato salad, watermelon, and cherry pie. We’re currently working on figuring out how much of each item to order and doing a cost analysis. Since we’re in a long-term care food service setting we have to keep in mind modified diets when ordering food. For example, for our mechanical soft and pureed ribs we have to order a boneless rib patty instead of the regular ribs.
In class tonight, we learned about human resources and financial management. It was interesting to hear about how much accounting food service managers are expected to do. I feel like accounting skills weren’t something I learned in undergrad, so it was nice to get exposure to this topic.
Tuesday:
We did our usual meal service supervision and each completed another nutrition assessment on a resident. We also had an inspector from the department of public health come in to evaluate the kitchen. Fortunately, we were able to shadow her to learn about the process. She explained what she looks for, and pointed out any things she noticed that need to be changed. It was a very interesting process that I’m glad we had the opportunity to observe. We continued working on planning for our special event as well.
Wednesday:
We spent most of our day finishing up the planning for our 4th of July special event. Then, we had to organize our planning process into a PowerPoint presentation for our final presentations in class next Monday. We included the entire process of planning a meal for our facility from choosing the menu to preparing the food. Luckily, since our special event is more of a special meal instead of a whole production most of the day-to-day production needs are the same. The main planning part of this event is selecting the foods and determining how much needs to be ordered.
Thursday:
In between supervising meal services we made some edits to our special event planning. Other than that, nothing too crazy happened.
Friday:
The day started off normal enough, however, lunch service went a little haywire. As you might expect, when residents are sharing living spaces for an extended period of time conflicts arise. During lunch service, we had not one, not two, but three conflicts between residents. One table had a verbal disagreement, another resident threw food she didn’t want, and another resident stole someone else’s hat off her head. Luckily, we had enough CNAs to diffuse the situations while others kept helping deliver trays so these spats didn’t disrupt meal service too much.
After supervised practice, I started my long drive to Minnesota for wedding weekend!
Weekend:
This weekend Spencer and I had a wedding to attend in Saint Paul. It was a lovely wedding, and a fun reception. Definitely made my 6.5 hour drive to attend worth it! The wedding took up most of Saturday, and then I had to drive back to Illinois on Sunday.
Next week is my last week of my dietetic internship. Until then!