Client Satisfaction on Hospital Diet Service at Base Hospital Akkaraipattu, Sri Lanka

Introduction: A clear insight of the aspects of diet satisfaction is crucial to promote health, nutritional status of patients and overall quality of diet service in hospital settings. Objectives: Major aims of this study to evaluate the client satisfaction on diet service at Base Hospital Akkaraipattu, to identify the association between overall satisfaction on hospital diet and patients? demographic characteristics and to describe the facilities in the hospital kitchen. Methods: A descriptive cross sectional study was carried out to assess client satisfaction. A total of 384 patients who received inpatient care and consume normal diet from 22nd April 2022 to 24th May 2022 were included in this study. Interview administrated questionnaire was used to collect data and data were analyzed by using SPSS software. A checklist was used to collect information regarding available hospital kitchen facilities. Results: In this study, 50% of patients neutrally satisfied with the overall quality of food service in hospital. Majority of the patients were neutral with variety, appearance, aroma, freshness, temperature of food and time of food delivery. Although most of them were dissatisfied with texture, tasted of food and temperature of hot drinks. The most satisfied aspects by the patients were the way of food delivery (54.7%), cleanliness of dishes and utensils (57.3%), and attitude and behaviors of food serving staffs (57%). Patient satisfaction on overall quality of food service was significantly associated with gender, age, academic background, and monthly income (p value less than 0.05). There was no significant association between marital status, ethnicity, length of hospital stay and overall quality of food service (p value greater than 0.05). The available human resources at the hospital kitchen are steward, assistant cooks, and cleaner while the chief and senior dieticians, store keeper and head cook are not available. And in the infrastructure, while the raw material receiving area and storage area, special diet area, garbage collection area, adequate space, cooking oven and distribution trolley are not available and all other facilities are available such as preparation area, cooking area, serving area, washing area, administrative area, adequate ventilation, gas, enough light, water supply, solid stainless flooring, steam supply, cutting equipment, weighing machine, grinding machine and mixing machine. Also the main defect of the resource is there is no any permanent place for kitchen. Conclusion: Patients were neutrally satisfied with the overall quality of diet service at Base Hospital Akkaraipattu. Taste, texture and temperature of hot foods were dissatisfied by the most patients which need to improved. To enhance the food quality, have to recruit well trained cooks for preparing foods. Regular monitoring and evaluation of the quality of food service in hospitalized patients are important to improve the overall quality of diet service.