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Introduction: Compassion trust courage, innovation, the values of Temecula Valley Hospital. We proudly present TVH Health Chat. Here's Melanie Cole.

Melanie Cole: Welcome to TVH health chat with Temecula Valley Hospital. I'm Melanie Cole, and today we're discussing nutritional services at TVH. Joining me is Jennifer Beadles. She's a Registered Dietician at Temecula Valley Hospital. Jennifer, I'm so glad to have you with us. So tell us about how important nutritional services are and the important role they play in patient care and recovery, because people may not realize that?

Jennifer Beadles: So, having adequate nutrition, especially while you're in the hospital is really important because it influences many different things. So it influences rate of infection, length of stay maintenance of muscle mass. When you're in the hospital, which influences, you know, how you're going to recover moving forward. If you have any chronic conditions like diabetes or congestive heart failure, having adequate nutrition can also affect how you recover on that end. So it is very important to make sure that we optimize our nutritional care for our patients here at TVH.

Host: So then tell us a little bit about your team, Jennifer, how many people are on the staff, what are some of the jobs and positions? What do you all do? Tell us how you work together?

Jennifer Beadles: We have a pretty good team of dieticians here. Some of us are nutrition support clinicians, which these are dieticians that specialize in critical care and clinical nutrition. So they work primarily in ICU. Then we also have dieticians that work up on the floors and regular med surge patients. So that would be things like anywhere from oncology to surgery, to diet education. So everybody here is pretty well-versed in all the nutritional needs of patients. So we have currently two CNSCs on staff. I'm getting my CNSC at the end of Fall, hopefully, and then the other ones are registered dieticians that aren't CNSCs, but everybody's great with patients. And we all really try to look at the whole patient as a whole picture of like what's going on in their admission and what's going on in their lives and how we can help them optimize their nutritional status. So I guess our day to day would just be looking at our patient load and going upstairs to try to talk to people and get a sense of what's going on and help them with what they need while they're here.

Host: And tell us about your executive chefs and food service workers. You're all working together, as you just said, but tell us about the specialized menus. People don't think of hospitals as having specialized menus.

Jennifer Beadles: Our food service staff works really hard to provide the patients with the foods that they want at a really good quality. So for instance, as I was saying earlier, we have people that have diabetes here or people with kidney failure or people that need salt restrictions because of heart issues. So all of those menus have been optimized for that specific patient population. So let's say that you need a sodium restriction, then you get a cardiac menu, and that only gives you low salt choices, but the cook really tries to make menus that are appealing for people, even though they might not be a super, you know, regular what they're used to at home. But we try to just make meals that are healthy, and balanced, and meet the nutritional needs of certain populations. We do have a regular menu for people that don't have any of those problems. It might be here for something else, but we try to give as many options as we can to everybody that comes in the hospital because ultimately our goal is to get you to eat, right? So we want you to eat. We want you to recover. We want you to get stronger. So definitely our food service staff plays a huge role in that.

Host: And they have to get pretty creative to make the food so appealing when you're doing a dysphasia diet or gluten free, or as you mentioned, a renal diet. So how do they get that creative?

Jennifer Beadles: I mean, experience and just playing around with stuff like I'm thinking last year we were trying to expand our dysphasia menu. So we were trying some different options that we could include. So we're always trying to optimize, we get feedback from patients. And so that helps us create menus that are more appealing for people. And like you say, it's hard when someone has dysphasia and they have to be on purees or they have to be on chopped meats. And it's not necessarily what they're used to, but we do our best to get feedback from them and try to change the menu when we can to better adapt to what our patients want.

Host: Well, then tell us about the responses. What have they been like? People must love ordering off a special menu and seeing creative things. Tell us what they've said?

Jennifer Beadles: We get a lot of good feedback about the fact that we are a room service hospital, because a lot of facilities are a set menu. So that means that when you go to the hospital, you just get whatever is going to be on the menu for that day. You have no choice, but here at TVH, we have a full menu for all of these different conditions. So people really like that they can choose, people like the omelets that's pretty popular and the meatloaf. So, you know, it just kind of depends on who you're talking to and how old they are and their backgrounds culturally. But in general, I think the most popular thing is that we have a full room service menu for them to choose. And that's kind of novel as far as clinical menus and nutrition goes

Host: Before we wrap up and thanks for telling us about some of the more popular items on the menu, reiterate the importance of nutritional services, why that's so important for patient care and especially people with really special needs as far as their nutritional needs go when they're in the hospital and how it helps them get out of the hospital faster and get back to their activities faster, kind of wrap it up for us and tell us about the nutritional services at Temecula Valley Hospital.

Jennifer Beadles: Yeah. So as I said earlier, when you are going through an illness, you are in an inflammatory state, which means that your body is trying to fight off whatever infection or whatever illness that you have at any given time. So what that does is that it uses up more of your energy stores. It uses up some of your muscle. And so it's important to provide people with adequate nutrition so that they can have the nutrients they need to recover from this illness. So like I was mentioning earlier, if you don't have adequate nutrition, when you're in the hospital, you can develop infections. You might have a longer period of recovery after a surgery, the length of stay is longer. It might be harder for you to mobilize after you've been admitted to the hospital and you have issues with your strength. So those are things that we really focus on here. So for example, if someone came in with a small bowel obstruction and they couldn't eat because their intestinal tract wasn't working as it should, we would intervene. And we would do intravenous nutrition to make sure that they're getting all the nutrients that they need. So we're trying to intervene on all fronts.

And that's kind of on the most critical side of things, as far as the seriousness of an illness goes, but it's also important to say, if you come in with a heart failure and it's important for you to follow a salt restriction, when you go home, if you don't do those things, when you go home, it's going to make it more difficult to control your fluid status and your heart issues. So it's important to also follow those things at home, or if you have diabetes and your blood sugars are not the best controlled, when we give you diet education, it's to give you a tool so that you can be healthy at home and you don't have to come back to the hospital for different issues. Of course, nutrition is only one part of that, but we do try to empower people to make choices that can help them improve their health in general. So I guess I would say it's two parts. We really intervene aggressively to help the people in the hospital that need the most intensive nutrition care so that they don't have muscle breakdown and they don't have infections and things like that. But then we also, for the people that are maybe a little bit on the healthier side, as far as hospital population go, we try to give them those tools that they need so that they don't come back to the hospital. They don't have complications and they can take charge of their health status.

Host: What great information to hear about the nutritional services at Temecula Valley Hospital. It's so important for patient care and recovery. Thank you so much again, Jennifer, for joining us today, and that concludes this episode of TVH Health Chat with Temecula Valley Hospital. Please visit our website at temeculavalleyhospital.com for more information, and to get connected with one of our providers. Please also remember to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast and all the other Temecula Valley Hospital podcasts. Physicians are independent practitioners who are not employees or agents of Temecula Valley Hospital. The hospital shall not be liable for actions or treatments provided by physicians. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.