Seniors at long-term care facilities operated by Alberta Health Services will no longer have to put up with reheated food.
Responding to complaints, provincial Health Minister Fred Horne has ordered Alberta Health Services to stop preparing meals offsite and reheating them at AHS long-term care centres, which has been the case since 2009, when AHS centralized a lot of its services.
“The complaints that we have heard are about the AHS-operated facilities where the centralized system was in place,” says Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne.
"By December, long-term care facilities operated by Alberta Health Services will be required to make meals for their residences on site… we believe this change will improve quality of life."
Horne admits the government has heard what residents and their families have said about the quality of food in our long-term care facilities and today, members are taking action to improve it. Horne says he started thinking about the food service in long-term care facilities shortly after he was appointed Health Minister.
He says the bottom line was, he asked himself, "would this be good enough for my mother, and quite frankly, it was not."
"I was not impressed. I have no doubt that the food was being served is nutritionally of value to the residents, but in terms of the appearance, and the variety, and all of the other things that go into home cooking if you will, it was clearly absent,” he adds.
“I think the decision we made today is going to restore a lot of that for our residents.”
AHS will also be required to improve the taste and appearance of meals.
Wildrose Seniors Critic Kerry Towle is demanding Horne apologize for forcing seniors to eat reheated meals for the past two and a half years.
Towle says the government should investigate meal preparation at other long-term care centres not run by Alberta Health.
The new rule applies to all AHS-operated facilities. AHS operates 73 of the 173 long-term care facilities in Alberta. The other residences are under contract with other providers, and will have to meet contractual standards as well as provincial legislation.
Guy Smith, from the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE), was pleased with the decision.
"I'd like to congratulate the government today on its decision to bring back on site meal preparation to its long-term care facilities across the province,” says Smith.
“It’s something that AUPE has been advocating for for months.”
“We're very pleased with that decision” he adds. “We know it's good for seniors, we know it’s good for our members who work in these facilities and want to provide the best care for seniors."
Smith also says preparing meals on-site rather than shipping in meals to be reheated will likely be less costly to taxpayers in the long run.
"The contract that Alberta Health Services had with Cisco and other providers shipping food in from all over North America was huge. We always said that there was no cost savings to that at all, in fact we said it probably cost more."
Smith expects some positions that were cut when the food service became centralized will now be returned.
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