My Food Choices is coming to Westmead & Auburn

Meet Westmead Hospital’s nutrition and dietetics team!

These dietitians will be crucial to the introduction of My Food Choice at Westmead and Auburn hospitals in the coming months.

My Food Choice is a more accurate, tech-savvy way of delivering meals to patients, ending the need for spare meals, reducing waste and saving money.

Westmead Hospital is the first large teaching hospital in NSW to go live with My Food Choice.

Under the new system, food services staff and dietitian assistants will provide each patient with a pictorial menu and take their order, just two to four hours before meal time.

Staff then enter the order on a mobile device and transmit it to the kitchen by Wi-Fi for instant action.

Deputy Head of Dietetics Ashwini Chand said the team was looking forward to using the new system, particularly the web-based nutrition dashboard.

“We will be able to see what patients are eating, allowing us to analyse and review the nutritional intake of protein and energy for each person,” she said.

“Seventy five per cent of patients in hospital rely on hospital food as their sole source of nutrition so the dashboard will be really important for dietetics staff; it will really help us manage each patient’s food intake and minimise hospital-acquired malnutrition.”

Ms Chand said dietitian assistants were set to take on more clinical duties as part of the transition.

“These staff will be able to manage complex dietary requests, screen patients for nutritional risks and malnutrition, assess the accuracy of main meal and mid-meal audits and help review patients requiring nutritional support,” she said.

My Food Choice will be introduced at Auburn Hospital in September and at Westmead Hospital in October.