Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Food in RSBY . . .


One of the major attractions of RSBY is the food that hospitals are supposed to provide. Considering the poor nutrition status of the region, many a time it has been a major challenge to make patients get the required food. Now, that RSBY is here, we've been able to get better food for the patient. 


The present arrangement is to provide the food from one of the local hotels at the market rates prevalent here. The patient gets 4 pooris and vegetable in the morning, rice with vegetable and dal curry in the afternoon and rotis with vegetable for dinner. We've negotiated this for Rs. 40 per day. I know that there is room for improvement, but the challenge is the logistics involved. One of the ideas has been to supplement this with some more form of food which will give extra nutrition. 


I'm not very confident with outsourcing the extra nutrition component as almost all of us are quite sure that nothing much will happen. The options being looked forward was to give one egg per day / one fruit per day / one glass of milk a day. However, there are challenges in almost all of them. 


However, the patients have been extremely delighted. Many of them have a good opinion about the food for the first two days - but then start complaining that it is too monotonous. Well, that's true for all of us especially when we eat food elsewhere other than at home. 


Looking forward for comments on how others have done this. The snap shown at the beginning of this post shows half the food provided to MD today afternoon. However, MD who has been with this for few days now is bored with the food, which I fully understand. 


But, before I finish this, the below snap is the food being taken by one of the patient's relatives who did not have a SMART card, which is common scene we have here of the food that patients and their relatives regularly take. So, you can judge on how much attractive and better it is to bring a patient with a RSBY card to us . . . 


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