Sometimes it takes an earthquake to shake things up.

Take the dining operations at UCLA Health System's main hospital facility in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. A year ago, it operated out of an antiquated kitchen that prevented any real deviation from a traditional trayline system. Meanwhile, retail operations centered around an equally dated café that had not seen significant upgrades in many years. It was well managed but limited by its infrastructure.

Today, a short 12 months later, the hospital boasts a model room service dining program, with to-order patient meals flowing from a modern kitchen custom designed just for that kind of production. And its retail operations are now augmented by a thoroughly modern dining commons with a series of fresh food stations serving a mix of ethnic and traditional dishes fitted expressly to meet the expectations of the local customer base.

The catalyst for this change: the Northridge earthquake, which hit the Los Angeles area in 1994 and prompted the state legislature to require California hospitals to move their acute and intensive care units to earthquake-resistant structures by 2008. After weighing the high cost of retrofit options for its existing structure to meet the mandate, UCLA decided to build a brand new facility instead.

As a result, UCLA Health System's nutrition services department — long starved of major capital funds — got itself cutting edge new facilities in the ultra-modern Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center complex, opened last June to “hospital of the future” raves (see sidebar).

It's both an enviable position and a challenging one for Nutrition Services Director Patti Oliver. After all, with the new facilities came raised expectations for both patient satisfaction and retail success.

Since taking over direction of the department in 2005, Oliver worked hard to ensure that the new construction would position her department for the challenges it would face in coming years.

Now it's time to begin putting that groundwork to the test.

A Chance at a Start-Over

Oliver took over as director knowing that the move to the new building would eventually be made (the original 2004 opening of the Reagan Center was pushed back several years, giving her an opportunity to add her input to the plans.)

Undoubtedly, the key opportunity presented by getting a new facility was the chance to implement room service, something that was not really feasible in the original building because of structural impediments.

Customers enjoy the colorful, lightdrenched atmosphere of the dining area in the new Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

In early 2006, UCLA Health System contracted with consulting firm Room Services Technologies LLC to work out the plans for designing a kitchen specifically adapted to the kind of room service dining program needed by the facility's critical-patient-heavy population (of the Reagan Center's 520 inpatient beds, 154 are in intensive care, a very high ratio).