Clinical Nutrition

P.D. Hinduja Hospital, Food Service Team strives to bridge nutritional deficits and serve vegetarian meals to the patients by designing wholesome nutritious therapeutic diet. Our menu takes into account cultural differences, special needs and preferences to provide nourishing and balanced meals.

Our Nutritional Care Team consists of Dieticians who are qualified health care professionals with Post Graduate degree in Foods Nutrition and Dietetics with a strong base of clinical knowledge.

Maintenance of comprehensive records is also an important element for the smooth functioning of the department. Apart from food service, dietary counselling forms a major part of our functions.

Recognizing patient needs and catering to the same is of prime importance.

1. Daily rounds of all admitted patients for nutritional assessment:
   During the hospital admission all patients are clinically assessed using appropriate Nutritional Assessment tools, screened and special care is taken for the patients who are at risk of malnutrition.
   A care plan is developed, implemented after evaluating the likes dislikes, food allergies and need for therapeutic diet.
2. Menu Designing:Planning therapeutic menu on weekly basis considering seasonal variations and availability to meet patient needs as well as nutritional requirements in consultation with the Food service team.
3. Sensory evaluation:Tasting for palatability and therapeutic acceptance of diet and portioning of special diet is done under the supervisor of Dietician and supervisor.
4. Therapeutic diet:All admitted patients are provided with therapeutic meal taking into consideration the food habits and cultural preferences with special attention to critically ill patients.
5. Standards and certifications to ensure safe and nutritious food service:We maintain standards by abiding all protocol laid by NABH, ISO 22000:2018,FSSAI, Eat right Campaign.
6. Patient counselling:Discharge diet advice/ counselling to the patients and patient education.
7. Research and Development:Carrying out various research projects in collaboration with the Doctors/ consultants/ interdepartmental to collect evidence based data and thereby improve patient care.

Our Quality Indicators:
Evaluation of patient feedback is done to improve service standards and increase patient satisfaction index.

1. Right food to right patient
2. Nutritional assessment within defined timeline.

Our goals of Nutritional management

1. Combating malnutrition:Patients who are malnourished or at risk of malnutrition on admission. Appropriate assessment and screening ensures right feeding practices in hospitalized patients, optimum calorie intake thereby improving nutritional status, reduction in food wastage and better outcome of medical nutritional therapy.
2. Collaboration with medical team of doctors:Medical nutritional therapy is administered to the hospitalized patients in collaboration with treating consultant with nutritional supplementation wherever required.
3. Diet Planning:Patient menus are designed to meet the needs of particular patient groups, e.g. Pre and post operational cases, the elderly, paediatric, co-morbidities and ethnic minorities. Adequate food choices are available to meet these needs. A range of meals, Ryles tube feeds, snacks, beverages specially designed, fortified in energy and protein are made available. The timing of meals are reviewed and made more relevant to patients' customary meal patterns.
4. Therapeutic diet preparation and service:All meals are cooked in-house, special diets are portioned and loaded in hot food trollies under the supervision of on duty Dietician and Food service supervisor. Pre-plated diet is labelled and served bedside at optimal temperature.

The dietary department is thus organized, equipped and staffed to provide food service to in-patients, employees and visitors. Service of food includes a number of functions - planning menus, purchase of raw materials and distribution of the finished product.

In our daily activities we overcome all challenges; Our Food service team takes pride in delivering quality care competently with compassion, consistently.