Quality dining in the nursing home: The residents’ perspectives

Quality food and food service are integral to quality of life for older adults in nursing homes. The purposes of this article are to examine residents’ perspectives about quality dining in nursing homes and to describe implications for practice. Tape-recorded interviews were completed with 20 nursing home residents who told stories about their food and food service and described a “perfect” mealtime. The pattern, “Fostering a Quality Dining Experience” containing five themes derived from residents’ perspectives, is discussed in this article. The quality of nursing home food and food service was examined using Rantz et al.’s (1999) multidimensional theoretical model integrating consumer and provider perspectives. Empirical support for the model was provided by the themes and pattern generated from these interviews.