How the Ottawa Hospital is transforming patient meals

CTV’s Katie Griffin has a look at how the Ottawa Hospital is transforming patient meals.

Hospital food is not something patients typically rave about, but the Ottawa Hospital is hoping to change that.

“What we wanted to do is really have a reset and emphasize that food is medicine,” said Michael LeJeune, director of Clinical Support Services. “By having a reset and redesigning our menu to include calories, protein, fibre, things that can achieve that healing process, what we want to do is have that reset, make sure that our menu is both healthy, nutritious, and delicious, have meals that patients want to eat and will ideally lead to positive patient recovery.”

The hospital has teamed up with Ottawa restaurateur Stephen Beckta to develop the trial menu that was rolled out on four units at the General campus as part of a pilot project last year.

“After meeting with world class dietitians, nutritionists, scientists and food service providers, we started to put things together,” Beckta said. “Once we recognized how important food is in the healing process, then we started to put together a menu that removed things—ultra processed foods and added sugars.”

Some of the choices on the trial menu included:

Breakfast

• Spanish omelet with roast potatoes and tomato salsa
• High-protein granola with Greek yogurt, banana and raisins

Lunch

• Chicken and baby kale Caesar salad with puffed quinoa and chickpeas
• Mushroom and lentil sloppy Joe with root vegetable chips

Dinner

• Shepherd’s pie with extra veggies and cottage cheese mashed potatoes
• Butter chicken with potatoes

Dessert

• Fresh fruit
• Energy bites

Beckta said his favourite item on the new menu is the high-protein, high-fibre adaptation of shepherd’s pie—a nod to his late mother who made the dish for him when he was sick growing up.

“We managed to stuff the mashed potatoes with high-protein cottage cheese and then added seven different vegetables into the ground beef mixture so that people are getting the comfort and all of the wonderful ingredients that helps them recover,” he said.

The food trial was done within the hospital’s existing budget.

“By changing the way that we took the orders, processed the orders, delivered the orders, cook the orders, we were able to save an enormous amount of waste and redirect it to higher quality ingredients and that was key. That’s the only way that this works, because these high-quality ingredients do cost more,” Beckta said.

The hospital’s Patient Food Services team serves more than 3,000 meals to roughly 1,200 patients every day.

“A meal is something they can look forward to, it’s an interaction with staff, so just highlighting the fact that we were focusing on this initiative was very positive and the feedback with the food has been positive as well,” LeJeune said.

There’s no timeline on a full rollout.

“We’d like to expand as quickly as possible, especially at the General campus, so we’re just looking into scalability,” he said.