In the following analysis, I will be mainly focusing about the hospitals and clinics in order to narrow down the scope. The health care industry has already been lasting for years, it mainly aims at curing patients. In Hong Kong, there are mainly two different sectors of this industry, the public sector(Hospital Authority) which is a semi-governmental organization, and the other one is the private sector, usually clinics or hospitals operated by one, or several doctors.
As Hong Kong is having an aging population, the major growth segment of the patients in hospitals are the senior citizen. Unlike the others, most of the seniors cannot be fed with solid food since they may choke and resulted in death. Therefore, most of the meals which are served to senior citizens are usually grind into moisturized mixture to prevent causing any accidents. Apart from the form of the food, the way that how the nurses feed them is also one of the most important key points. Accidents happened due to the nurse feeding the aged patient too fast.
Limited choice of food
Usually when a person is lack of some kinds of nutrients, he will be weak and end up getting sick. For the patients who are staying in hospitals, nutrients are extremely important for them for recovery purpose. The Hospital Authority has been facing this problem for years. Due to the huge demand, the food that hospitals provide cannot be something fancy and there are only few choices on the menus.
Trend:
Limited choice of food
As mentioned as one of the challenges in the above paragraph, hospitals tends to not providing too many choices of food to the patients. And actually this provides a lot of advantages to the hospitals which have this practice. This strategy makes demand forecasting easier since there is not much variety of food choices. Also, limited choices allows mass production and makes the process flow smoother.
Extra nutritional value in menu planning
Unlike from the past, menus in hospitals nowadays are designed by nutritionists in order to maximize the nutritional value of the food provided to patients while not sacrificing too much tastiness.
Conclusion:
We are always being taught that when we are solving operational problems, we should not only focus on the software side or hardware side, but both of them. In this Health Care industry, service quality delivered by nurses would be the software side and the menu engineering of hospitals would be the hardware part. The government should invest in more resources of keeping the nurses due to the overwhelming workload. Besides, they can focus on more about the menu engineering since usually patients usually are not in a mood of eating when they are sick.
References:
https://www.healthcatalyst.com/top-healthcare-trends-challenges-2015
http://www.forbes.com/sites/leahbinder/2013/02/21/the-five-biggest-problems-in-health-care-today/
http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201311/27/P201311270508.htm
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