Hospital Food Taken Off Criticized List

Picture the dreaded hospital meal: drab meat and limp vegetables, finished off with gelatin cubes. Now toss that stereotype out the window.

At UCI Medical Center in Orange and at a growing number of hospitals around the country, hospital food is cooked to order with offerings more in keeping with a neighborhood chef than a white-coated dietitian.

Patients can order food from a wide-ranging menu offering pizza, penne Alfredo, or Asian stir fry “with a sesame soy infusion and served over steamed Jasmine rice.” For dessert, chocolate cake, or perhaps bread pudding with vanilla sauce.

And if they want silver-dollar pancakes for dinner or a chicken Caesar salad for breakfast, that’s OK too. Even the mac and cheese from the kid’s menu is theirs for the asking.

“It’s kind of like an all-inclusive resort,” UCI Medical Center spokeswoman Kim Pine said. “It’s a really competitive health care market. Customer service is something patients are looking for in a hospital these days in addition to medical care.”

A marketing ploy it may be, one that goes along with the valet parking the hospital started offering recently. But the patients pay the same for the new food service, and hospital officials say the system reduces waste because patients order only what they want. An added advantage: They might get better nutrition, because they’re craving the food that arrives.

The hospital launched its At Your Request Room Service Dining Tuesday after a one-month trial period. It joins 100 hospitals nationwide and only two others--Northridge Hospital Medical Center and Riverside Community Hospital--in California.

Dietary restrictions stand. No cheeseburger and fries for the post-operative triple-bypass.

When Mary Hodges of Downey asked for bread pudding with vanilla sauce, the nutrition assistant politely told her it was not part of her approved diabetic diet. How about angel food cake instead? Hodges was appeased.

For lunch Tuesday, she sampled the tossed green salad, french dip au jus and carrot and celery sticks. She was already anticipating dinner: turkey with all the trimmings.

UCI Medical Center’s cuisine is geared toward the area’s many residents of Latino and Asian heritage, with such offerings as taquitos, menudo and pork-stuffed steamed Asian dumplings.

“It’s very nice to be able to choose your own menu and call it in like room service,” Hodges said. “It makes things a lot better because sometimes all you have to look forward to [at the hospital] is your meals.”

Dial F-O-O-D for the Sous Chef

When Hodges and other patients dial F-O-O-D, their orders are funneled through a mini-call center where three nutrition assistants note the meal selections down to minute details such as whether the patients want lemon in their iced tea. Printers automatically spit out the requests in the kitchen. Sous chef Jason Briles oversees the culinary preparation.

The food arrives within 45 minutes.

“It’s just amazing how much better it is when you get what you want as opposed to ‘Here’s the meatloaf,’ ” said Gloriane Crater, director of the hospital’s food and nutrition services.

The hospital contracts with Sodexho Marriott Services, which has offered the menu program for four years. It continues to gain popularity, said project manager Sylvia Mortenson, who created the program while working at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. She devised the idea because cancer patients were either sending their trays back untouched or requesting different food. By the time a new meal could be prepared and delivered, the patient often no longer wanted to eat.

At several hospitals, customer satisfaction levels with the food have reached 100%, something almost unheard of in the food arena, said Mortenson, who is booked until February installing the service at various hospitals.

“In my prediction, five years from now, this will be the way,” Crater said.

At Northridge Hospital Medical Center in San Fernando Valley, the program has been running since May. There, hospital visitors also can order food and eat alongside the patient. Guests pay $5 a meal or three for $12.

Crater said UCI Medical Center eventually might offer a similar service, but first plans to extend it to the hospital’s outpatient areas such as the Infusion Center where cancer patients receive chemotherapy treatment.

Jessica Avalos of Anaheim polished off her burrito Colorado--with chicken, rice and refried beans smothered in a red chile sauce and topped with melted cheese, according to the menu--and declared it so tasty she was considering ordering it again for dinner.

“I feel like I’m in a hotel,” she said.