QUALITY OF PATIENT MEAL SERVICE IN HOSPITALS - DELIVERY OF MEALS BY DIETARY EMPLOYEES VS DELIVERY BY NURSING EMPLOYEES

Objective To compare patient assessment of meal-service quality and em ployee-service orientation in hospitals where dietary employees delive r meals trays and in hospitals where nursing employees deliver meal tr ays. Design Survey. Setting General, medical-surgical (not Veterans Ad ministration) hospitals of 300 to 500 beds with a self-operated foodse rvice department and a centralized, conventional food production syste m. Subjects 552 patients and 192 employees in nine hospitals geographi cally dispersed in the midwestern and eastern United States. Dietary e mployees delivered meal trays in five of the hospitals and nursing emp loyees delivered trays in four. Main outcome measures On a five-point scale, patients indicated level of agreement with 16 statements about hospital meal service. Employees who delivered meal trays rated their agreement with 20 service orientation statements on a five-point scale . Statistical analysis Factor analysis with varimax rotation,(2)(chi) analysis, and analysis of variance. Results Patient assessment of the quality of meal service was multidimensional. Patients gave more posit ive ratings to characteristics of the personnel delivering the tray th an to the quality of the food. Patients in hospitals where dietary emp loyees delivered meal trays rated the quality of food Significantly hi gher (P<.01) than did patients in hospitals where nursing employees de livered trays. Service orientation of the personnel delivering the tra y:; was also multidimensional. Dietary and nursing employees did not d iffer in their personal motivation toward providing service; however, dietary employees rated the organizational support for providing servi ce significantly higher (P<.001) than did nursing employees. Nursing e mployees were significantly more positive (P<.05) than dietary employe es about their interactions with patients. Conclusions Patient percept ions of service quality differed in hospitals where dietary employees delivered meal trays and in those where nursing personnel delivered tr ays. Dietary and nursing employees differed in some aspects of their s ervice orientation.