Incorrect diet orders cook up potential safety events
Spanning a recent three-week period in Lutheran’s kitchen, 16 potential safety events were avoided, thanks to the attentiveness of our Nutrition Services team. The culprit? Physicians are incorrectly documenting diet restrictions in the “comments” section of the Diet Order, which does not interface with the Food Service program that generates our patients’ available menus.
The functionality and navigation of the Diet Order have been designed to allow you to quickly and precisely document your patients’ special nutritional needs, with preset options available to ensure that most therapeutic diet restrictions can be chosen from the available fast-click selections.
This platform allows those restrictions to automatically interface into our Food Service program and ensures our patients are only able to select food and drink items based off of the restrictions you select.
Additional clarification: Adult Diet Regular should only be selected if there is no intended restriction to any nutrient or texture modification to food or beverages. The only restrictions that are available to order within the Regular diet are tray delivery and meal ordering options. Safety tray options are also available to order in the Regular diet.
If you intend to order any therapeutic modifications:
Search for the diet order, “ADULT DIET.”
For Diet Type, select “Therapeutic.”
Once selected, you have the option to choose from preset diets, such as Consistent Carb, Heart Healthy, Renal and more. Each preset therapeutic diet provides details of the restrictions in the description below it. If you decide that those diets are too restrictive and only want one nutrient limited, such as “2 gm potassium,” “low fat,” “2 gm Na,” etc., you need to choose the option “Custom (specify).”
From here, you can choose individual restrictions, such as caffeine, fluids, carbs, fat, phos, potassium, etc. If you select a Custom diet, you must select at least one option from the custom selections to initiate the order, and you have the option to select as many restrictions as appropriate for the patient.
Thank you for your immediate attention to this issue and for ensuring our patients are served the safest-possible meals during their recovery.