Over the past four or five years, I have watched something quietly change in aged care dining rooms.
Newer homes increasingly favour smaller household models, often with multiple dining rooms and serveries, rather than one large institutional space. Smaller groups of residents can eat in more domestic environments, supported by people they know.
Alongside that change in design, something else has shifted.
The people delivering the dining experience have changed
Traditionally, the division was reasonably clear. Catering teams prepared, plated and served the food, and managed much of the dining-room service. Care staff supported residents who required assistance with eating, positioning, prompting or supervision, and were there to observe and respond when something wasn’t right.
Increasingly, I see a different model. A catering team member may manage the servery, plating, food safety and meal quality, while care staff take responsibility for much more of the experience at the table.
There are good reasons for this evolution. Residents are entering aged care with increasingly complex needs. Household models have changed the physical environment, and workforce pressures have changed how people are rostered and deployed.
Care minutes now add another dimension.
Care-minute requirements didn’t create the household dining model, and it would be too simplistic to attribute the changes I have observed to one policy. But they increasingly sit alongside, and potentially reinforce, a workforce model that was already emerging.
The distinction becomes particularly interesting at mealtimes.
A personal care worker assisting a resident to eat can be delivering recognised direct care. Current government guidance includes assistance with eating and drinking, including feeding where necessary, among activities that can contribute to care minutes. Preparing or serving that same meal does not.
So, within the same dining room, the same worker can move between recognised direct care and general dining activity, sometimes within minutes.
The distinction is necessary. But it also tells us something about how closely care and hospitality now sit alongside each other.
Where care and hospitality meet
Providers are working to achieve care-minute requirements while expectations around food, nutrition and the dining experience continue to rise. These can easily be treated as separate operational challenges.
But at the table? They converge.
A resident who needs help to eat needs that care regardless of where the meal is served. Providing that support in the dining room is not time away from care: it’s part of care delivery.
At exactly the same time, the catering team is responsible for producing a meal that is safe, appropriate, appealing and enjoyable.
The functions remain different, but the resident outcome depends on both.
This isn’t an argument for hospitality activities to be rebadged as care. It’s about recognising where genuine care and good hospitality are already being delivered together and designing our workforce around that reality.
But, there’s another consequence of this shift that I believe deserves more attention.
As responsibility for the dining experience moves, capability needs to move with it
Hospitality is more than transporting a plate from the servery to the table. It’s the timing and flow of a meal, how food is presented and described, knowledge of individual preferences, communication with the kitchen, and recognising when the experience is beginning to break down.
Individually these things can appear small, but together, they determine much of what a resident experiences at mealtimes.
If care staff are increasingly responsible for this part of the dining experience, we can’t simply assume that hospitality knowledge transfers with the task. That, however, creates an opportunity.
Rather than continuing to think about care and catering as separate workforces that happen to meet three times a day, perhaps we should become much more deliberate about the capability required at that intersection.
Catering teams need to understand what care teams are trying to achieve. Care teams need the hospitality knowledge required to protect the quality of the meal and the experience surrounding it. Both need to understand where their responsibilities overlap – and where they don’t.
Because organisationally, aged care needs boundaries. Funding requires categories, care minutes require definitions, and teams need clear responsibilities. Because at the end of the day, the resident experiences something much more complete.
The food, assistance, conversation, pace of service and response when something changes are all part of the same mealtime. A beautifully prepared meal can still become a poor experience if assistance arrives too late. Excellent care can’t make cold or inappropriate food enjoyable.
The quality sits in how well those pieces come together
Perhaps care minutes haven’t simply changed how we measure care. Alongside broader reforms already happening, they might also be influencing where care happens, who delivers parts of the dining experience, and what our future workforce needs to know.
If that’s where the sector is heading, our thinking about hospitality needs to move with it.
Care minutes matter because care matters and measuring them creates accountability. But a good mealtime will always contain things no metric was designed to capture: familiarity, conversation, patience, preference and the simple experience of being looked after well.
Because not everything that makes a resident feel cared for can be counted. But it still counts.
