Over the past four or five years, something has quietly changed in aged care dining rooms: the line between care and catering has blurred, and care-minute requirements are now sitting alongside that shift. This piece looks at what happens when funding categories meet the reality of the table — and why the parts of a mealtime that matter most are often the parts no metric was built to capture.
IDDSI standardised texture-modified food and thickened fluids across aged care, changing how risk is described. But safety language alone hasn’t fixed rosters, training or communication pathways – and Standard 6 now demands the operating model catch up.
Aged care providers ask where the money will come from before asking whether their kitchen system is already wasting it. Poor design costs more than budgets do – through waste, rework, complaints and burnt-out chefs carrying risk no one else sees.
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