Since breakfast is often considered the most important meal of the day, when TCU senior Rachel Vest started her internship at Baylor Medical Center at Southwest Fort Worth, she knew something had to change.
Vest, a coordinated dietetics major from Columbia, Tenn., has spent a large portion of her seven-week internship working to improve the hospital’s breakfast menu. After spring break, when she started her internship, Vest said the breakfast offered to patients was lacking in several ways, mainly temperature and quality, so she decided to dedicate her time to improving the preparation of the food.
“We want to make sure that patients are able to enjoy their breakfast and make sure that they are receiving the best foods for their recovery process,” Vest said. “If our patients are not eating their breakfast because of a lack of quality, then we are missing out on an important opportunity to help speed the recovery process and we are not doing everything we can to help the patient get better.”
After evaluating the meal and current cooking practices, Vest followed the directions herself to find out what was missing. She soon discovered that the problem was not in the ingredients themselves, but in the execution of the cooking.
“One of the main things that we worked with was the oatmeal, cream of wheat and grits preparation,” Vest said. “We didn't have a standardized method to cook those foods so some days they were runny and wet and some days they were hard as a rock.”
Soon, Vest made charts and began teaching the hostesses, who prepare and serve the food, how to use the correct proportions of each ingredient to make the perfect meal. After teaching them the correct way to cook the food she worked with test trays to determine the right temperature to serve the food at.
“I set up tables with lists of how much water and how much dry ingredients to use with each product and did extra training to make sure that the hostess could get a cereal with the right consistency and flavor,” Vest said.
A new endeavor then became getting feedback from patients. After going around to patients’ rooms and hearing what they thought of the breakfast offered by the hospital, she was able to decide what the best temperature would be to serve the food. Through sampling test trays she ensured that the patients would get exactly what they wanted.
Vest continued to get feedback, making rounds once every week to hear comments from patients about the breakfast food they had been served. Vest said the positive results can be best observed through the positive feedback they have been getting from patients.
Vest has no doubt about the importance of breakfast, especially at a place such as a hospital where patients are recovering from many ailments.
“When a person is sick or trying to heal from any type of injury or operation, nutrition becomes especially important in the recovery process,” Vest said. “Breakfast is important because it not only contributes to the overall diet, but it’s the first meal of the day and can help to set the tone for lunch and dinner.”
Vest believes revamping parts of the breakfast menu- which includes a choice of a variety of drinks, hot cereals, cold cereals, eggs, and breads- prepared in a manner now to provide patients the utmost quality, is important. Vest said she drew on her experiences from a previous semester-long internship with food service management and classes on food preparation, quantity foods and foods service management as she revised the breakfast menu. Her recent internship allowed her to apply the lessons she learned both in and outside of the classroom to ensure the revised breakfast plan was executed correctly.
Dr. Lyn Dart, assistant professor in the TCU Department of Nutritional Sciences and director of the Didactic Program in Dietetics, said this kind of experience will help Vest after graduation as she prepares to take the coordinated dietician test, the test she must pass to become a registered dietician, and will also be useful as she begins her career.
Vest’s experiences revamping the breakfast plan illustrate the benefits of the Coordinated Program in Dietetics offered through the TCU Department of Nutritional Sciences. The program ensures that students are given a plethora of hands-on experience by requiring a minimum 900 hours of supervised practice. This requirement is based on the requisite necessary to qualify for the Foundation Knowledge and Skills and Competencies for entry-level dietitians specified by The American Dietetic Association.
While only 900 hours are required, Vest said that by graduation many students have about 1,000 hours of supervised practice.
To complete her required hours, Vest and her fellow classmates did internship rotations at different places such as TCU Starpoint, Harris Methodist Hospital and WIC (Women, Infants and Children), a program that provides nutritional foods, supplement diets, information on healthy eating and health care referrals to low-income women and children up to age five
After graduation in May, Vest plans to move back to her home state of Tennessee to get into clinical nutrition and food service management and earn certification as a registered dietician for a hospital.
“Rachel is a very accomplished student as well as an accomplished professional. She is a quality individual,” Dart said.
For more information on TCU’s department of nutrition, visit www.nut.tcu.edu.
