Lee Vines, sales and marketing director at PKL Group, a leading supplier of temporary and permanent catering infrastructure, considers the challenges facing hospital caterers and estates managers in ensuring that catering equipment is kept up-to-date and fit-for-purpose
He also discusses the options available to make sure kitchen services are able to run without interruption during planned or unplanned periods of kitchen ‘downtime’.
Providing appropriate nutrition for all in a hospital setting is a particularly challenging task due to patients’ diverse dietary needs, not to mention different age groups, religious, cultural, and social backgrounds, as well as different medical conditions. Caterers not only need to provide a wide-ranging menu to meet the needs of patients, staff, and visitors to the hospital, but also require a kitchen estate that is able to back this up.
This provides a set of challenges in its own right. In particular, hospitals where visitors, staff, and patients, are being catered for from within the same kitchen can require a broad range of catering equipment, which will see heavy use, necessitating both thorough, regular maintenance of existing equipment, and the replacement of some items as and when needed. Replacing kitchen equipment does, however, become more of a challenge when capital resource is limited, while the downtime associated with replacing key items such as ovens can be disruptive to the catering operation.
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