Nutrition and Catering Service

In the beginning of IPO-Porto the catering of patients and staff was assured by several outsource companies. However, when the Nutrition and Catering Service was created, on June 1978, that responsibility was assumed by the Service, which had its own staff and occupied “temporary” facilities until May 1994, when the current Kitchen and Cafeteria were inaugurated.

Policy

The Nutrition and Catering Service participates and operates according to the institutional decisions made, in a perspective of continuous improvement and quality guarantee of the services provided, taking the optimization of the existing resources into consideration, for the patients’ catering and nutritional benefit.

Mission

Guarantee the supply of balanced meals, under the nutritional point of view, safe from the microbiological point of view, and suitable for the patients’ clinical situation. Guarantee food and nutritional support suitable for oncological patients monitored in the Institution, both inpatients and outpatients, so that they can recover from the effects of the disease, comorbidities and/or treatments applied.

Strategy

– Supervision of the entire food production chain in the Kitchen; – Supervision of the meals served to inpatients, staff’s Cafeteria and Bar; – Control the production costs; – Adapt the hospital menus to the needs and preferences of inpatients; – Food and nutritional monitoring of undernourished patients and in risk of undernourishment; – Catering and nutritional evaluation and guidance of inpatients of all services, after request of cooperation from the assistant physician or nurse, by using a proper nutritional therapy (enteric and parenteral nutrition, supplementation, individualized food scheme, special diets and/or discharge food counselling) and food monitoring; – Perform Nutrition Consultations to outpatients (adults and paediatrics) who need to optimize their nutritional status, or minimize the nutritional losses resulting from their clinical situation.