New ways in patient catering: Breakfast in Swiss hospitals becomes mobile

ABSTRACT

According to the OECD ranking, Switzerland has one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world. In addition to other reasons, Switzerland introduced the remuneration system Swiss DRG four years ago in order to have an economically affordable healthcare system. Within this new remuneration system, transparency as well as efficiency and effectiveness are important principles. As the facility management is responsible for a third of the hospital costs and supports the core business, it has an important role in underpinning these principles. Currently, new ways of patient catering are being developed and tested. This research sets out to learn about the effects thereof. In order to do so, a mixed-method case study was carried out in three selected Swiss hospitals. The study has revealed that patient catering under new paradigms in order to become more efficient and closer to the needs of the patients is a challenge. The recently developed breakfast trolley can support Facility Managers in hospitals to face these challenges. As a result, different impacts on patients' breakfast between the classical way of patient catering and the new approach with the breakfast trolley could be identified. In addition, a closer look is taken on staff attitude towards this new way of patient catering. These findings provide facility managers in the healthcare sector with additional argumentation to meet the current challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Activity-based costing
• breakfast trolley
• facility management
• healthcare
• patient catering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Gabriela Züger Research Associate holds an MSc in FM degreed. Presently she is working on here PhD that is entitled: “Cost Factor Food Waste in Swiss Hospitals. A case study on food service processes to develop a food service optimisation tool for facility management”. In addition, she is responsible for different research projects in the field of Facility Management in Healthcare.

Beatrice Ammann Research Assistant holds an MSc in FM degree and works as a research assistant in different projects.

Dr. Alejandro Santis, is currently Head of Projects at the BFH-CSEM Energy Storage Research Centre (ESReC). He is a chemical engineer from TU Graz and obtained a promotion in Mechanical Engineering at ETH Zurich.

Professor Dr. Susanne Hofer has more than two decades of experience in international hotel business and finance, as well as many years of strategic leadership for a Swiss hospital group. For the past 10 years, she has worked as a senior lecturer and member of the institute management board.

Notes

1 The figures in Swiss Francs (CHF) are almost the same amount in $US based on [29. Oanda. Währungsrechner 2017 [cited 2017 January 23]. Available from: https://www.oanda.com/lang/de/currency/converter/.