I enjoy teaching Kind Dining (hospitality and customer service) workshops and helping  community staff at all levels learn new skills to implement right away which improves their service  at mealtimes.  I will be sharing more about my recent experience in St. Louis, working with Bethesda Health Group Inc. A company which is bringing Higher Standards of service to their residents, through skill development and relationship building of their staff. Read more in my next Kind Dining® Connection newsletter…

Read the January 2012 issue of Kind Dining® Connection for:

• Ways to foster community in the dining room, especially for single residents
• A Kind Dining® success story that will warm your heart
• Ideas for winter table centerpieces
• A new B♥ Kind, B♥ Courteous, B♥ Service Smart tip
• And much more!

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Photo Credit: Long-Term Living Magazine. From left to right: Villa Crest Administrator Sarah McEvoy, Long-Term Living Editor-in-Chief Patricia Sheehan, and Villa Crest Executive Chef Manny Perry.

PORTLAND, Ore. — The Villa Crest Nursing and Retirement Center of Manchester, N.H. dramatically increased meal revenue while also improving both customer and staff satisfaction just over a one-year period. The efforts earned Villa Crest the national 2011 Optima award presented by Long-Term Living Magazine for innovative, outcome-oriented staff teamwork in long-term care communities. Key to the Center’s success is the innovative Kind Dining® training it implemented from the Portland, Oregon company, Higher Standards, LLC. The training transforms and elevates the dining experience in senior living communities.

Kind Dining®: Bringing Warmth to the Table is a 9-module training series developed and taught by service and nutrition expert Cindy Heilman, MS, DTR. The unique training is designed to incorporate hospitality and empathy with proper serving techniques. Research clearly indicates that residents who are highly satisfied with meals, food and the dining experience are more satisfied in their living environment and healthier overall. On a typical day, many residents spend as much as 60 percent of their time preparing for, engaging in, or returning from meals.

Villa Crest staff embraced Kind Dining® training as they embarked on a significant dining room overhaul, moving from a traditional approach with limited options and a rigid daily schedule to a new restaurant-style dining experience called CHOICES. Villa Crest improved the menu and service by offering freshly-made fare, adding flexibility to the dining room hours of operation, and implementing principles of hospitality through Kind Dining®. The dining experience was transformed to focus on resident-centered care and satisfaction. After the training, staff understood the importance of meal service from the residents’ perspective.

The CHOICES restaurant was implemented in April of 2010. In a little over a year, Villa Crest increased its guest meal revenue by an impressive 80%. The changes also resulted in increases in resident and staff satisfaction scores. Additional evidence gathered by Villa Crest indicates that social activity has increased and personal connections among residents have been enhanced by the culture change in the dining room.

“Kind Dining® training truly transformed our operation. Everything from small details like having servers understand how to respectfully address our residents to providing extended hours of meal service resulted in a significant improvement in our meal revenue and resident satisfaction. People aren’t born knowing how to provide good service—they need to be taught. I’m grateful to Cindy Heilman for her expertise,” said Sara McEvoy, Villa Crest administrator.

“I’m thrilled that Villa Crest won the Optima Award,” said Cindy Heilman, the creator of the Kind Dining® training and CEO of Higher Standards, LLC. “I applaud administrator Sarah McEvoy and her partners for taking the steps to make a positive impact on the lives of their residents. The results they achieved from transforming meal service shows how vital the dining experience is in the success of senior care communities.”

The Pioneer Network has finalized and published nationally agreed upon new food and dining standards for people living in nursing homes

The New Dining Practice Standards are in-line with Quality Indicator Survey (QIS) processes and Pioneer Network anticipates Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will refer to these standards where they fit within current long-term care interpretive guidelines. Twelve national professional associations have already agreed to support the standards.

Are you ready to implement the new standards? The next challenge for senior living communities that want to stay on the competitive edge, is to integrate these standards into everyday dining practice. Staff training and new organizational expectations will be key to changing dining standards in your senior residence.

“[Kind Dining®] training materials are consistent with the new recommendations,” according to Dr. Sandra F. Simmons, Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University, Center for Quality Aging, who participated in the Pioneer Network Food and Dining Clinical Standards Task Force. Which means, if your staff has already participated in Kind Dining® Training, you are ahead of the game in implementing the new standards. As you familiarize yourself with the new standards, if you have questions about how to train your staff, please feel free to call me.

• Dining Observation
• Quality Assessment and Assurance (QA&A)
• Infection Control
• Kitchen/Food Service Observation

Or, visit our Resources page for these and other useful forms.

Our Kind Dining training inspired staff to polish their service, with on-going training and service improvement.

In the same way we no longer refer to psychiatric hospitals as “lunatic asylums,” or label the people inside them as “insane,” we no longer use archaic and insensitive terms for seniors or the places they live.

Wave after wave of reform, built upon greater understanding and education, has changed the culture of modern senior living communities.  So I was taken aback several weeks ago when I was visiting a community and heard the term “feeders” used to describe dining residents by a nursing intern.

I was stunned by the use of that term in 2011. And I couldn’t imagine how a resident would react to being referred to as a “feeder,” as if that person was lining up in a barn to eat hay, like a cow.  I think it goes without saying that terms such as “feeder” must be rooted out. That language is an echo to an earlier time, an era that has thankfully faded into the past.

It is important that providers and nurses stay current, remain up-to-date on culture change in nursing homes, and work proactively for progress. Incidentally, a community could be cited for using a term like “feeder” today. It’s a dignity issue and not a small one.

Nothing gives me more enthusiasm for pressing ahead and making a dent in the overall quality of hospitality in this industry. Of course, it needs more than a dent. It needs a big shove!

Recently, I heard from a manager in Newberg, Ore. who had sent two of her employees to my three-day training workshop.

In a follow-up conversation she was delighted to share that her two employees came back motivated and energized. They realized that their problems were not insurmountable and were inspired to tackle them.

Not only that, these two had implemented immediate behavior changes in order to foster team spirit.

They were leading the dining service team in a pre-meal high-five!

How great is that? That sort of enthusiasm and team-building is crucial to building a cheerful workplace, which carries over to a warmer dining experience for residents.

Kind Dining training can truly make a difference, one high-five at a time.

I checked in with Sarah, the administrator I am working with in New Hampshire. I wanted to know how things were going since my training sessions there.

She sounded alarmed at first.

“I’m afraid we’re backsliding,” she said.

It turns out there had been an incident in the dining room.

A young server took one look at the soup of the day, a cream-based soup, recoiled, and blurted out loud something along the lines of: “Yuck! I wouldn’t eat that!”

Of course, when residents hear words like these it instantly lowers their confidence in the food that they are about to be served. And we cover that in Kind Dining training.

Fortunately, Dave, their administrator in training happened to be close by, heard the unchecked outburst, and swiftly moved to rectify it.

The problem was minor. The cream in the soup had gotten a little too hot and begun to separate. Simply stirring the soup and garnishing it effectively solved the server’s problem with its appearance.

Sarah was upset that the Kind Dining lesson had not sunk in with the server.

I told Sarah I wasn’t surprised. Teenagers are unlikely to get it the first time. They need to be reinforced constantly.

For me, the story illustrates the importance of having an experienced problem-solver onsite at every meal. If the administrator hadn’t been nearby, this situation could have been a lot more damaging.

Secondly, it tells me that coaching Kind Dining behavior doesn’t end when the training sessions are complete and the workbook is finished. There must be consistent follow-up coaching to make sure that the lessons sink in.

Kind Dining training is so much more than the memorization of items at a proper place setting. It goes much deeper, to changing attitudes, perspectives and habits in order to become a customer service professional.

And unfortunately, there will be times when the process takes one step back before moving two steps forward. These changes aren’t easy!