Royal Surrey recognises major benefits by switching to Steamplicity

Background

The Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (RSCH) is a leading general hospital with 559 beds, providing emergency and general hospital services across Surrey, West Sussex and Hampshire. Since 2010, Medirest has been providing a range of soft FM services including patient catering (traditional fresh cook), housekeeping and portering.

Patients were at the heart of the change

RSCH wanted to future-proof the patient catering service by updating the facility and by utilising the space available in a more proactive way, to benefit both patients and the Trust. The focus was to improve the overall patient experience enabling a superior quality and wider choice at meal times, as well as releasing time for the RSCH clinical teams to deliver care.

Before transferring from a traditional cook operation to Steamplicity, we fully engaged with key stakeholders including patients, clinical teams, dietitians and the Trust board who completed visits to our Cuisine Centre, where Steamplicity meals are prepared, to undertake tasting sessions as well as site visits to our other Trust clients to evidence in practice Steamplicity.

How was Steamplicity implemented?

Mobilisation of the new service was completed in April 2018 over a two week period. The plan focused on three areas:

1. Communication - winning hearts and minds

2. Training - providing our colleagues with the right skills to deliver a great service

3. Logistics - ensuring food, equipment and the people were in the right place at right time.

A temporary cold room was installed allowing a phased transition, each ward being mobilised following the refurbishment of the ward kitchens. The installation of a dedicated 100m2 cold room enabled the reduction of kitchen space required and has released 141m2 space back to the Trust.

The benefits of changing to Steamplicity

Implementing Steamplicity has made a positive impact on the patient experience - delivering patient satisfaction scores of 98%. Achieved by focusing on, three key areas: choice, temperature and quality; as documented in the 2017 Patient Association Patient First report;

1. Choice - increasing the range of hot meals per service from 4 to 29

2. Temperature - cooking at ward level improving satisfaction of temperature by 21%

3. Quality – Steamplicity enabled a 32% improvement in the appearance of the food, a 47% improvement satisfaction with taste and 71% of patients surveyed rated the Steamplicity meals texture, as either very good or excellent.

Improved PLACE (Patient Led Assessment of Care Environment) scores

The implementation of Steamplicity has enabled hot food to be available 24/7, and a wide choice of food has contributed to the initial 2.2% improvement in food related PLACE scores - a direct result of the Steamplicity model being introduced at RSCH.

Steamplicity contributes to operational efficiency:

• Food waste reduced from 4% to 2.5%
• A 33% energy saving by moving away from traditional cooking methods
• 141m2 of valuable space has been released back to the Trust - providing accommodation for 12 people.

An extra hour for patient care for clinical teams

Over an hour a day released to provide better patient care, with 90% of the clinical teams commenting that Steamplicity delivers a better patient experience.