Carol Baldwin
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Wakaw Recorder
Expectant moms and kids staying at Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital in Saskatoon will experience a fresh approach to mealtime with the introduction of Ready Set Eat.
This innovative new food service approach prioritizes patient choice, nutrition and healing. Through Ready Set Eat, meals are freshly prepared and tailored to meet local, seasonal and cultural food preferences, and is another way the SHA is responding to patient and family needs and improving the hospital experience. Meals are also delivered when patients are ready to eat rather than at fixed times, providing more flexibility.
“Involving children and families in decisions about their care creates a supportive environment for their recovery,” Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill said.
In a 2019 paper prepared for the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health, “Room Service Food Delivery Models for Hospital In-Patients: A Review of Clinical Effectiveness, Cost-Effectiveness, and Guidelines,” authors Calvin Young and Kelly Farrah looked at food delivery models in hospitals and the impact on patients’ nutritional health. If patients do not like the food being served or are unfamiliar with it, most often it is returned to the kitchen and therefore wasted. Included were studies conducted in Australia, India, the Netherlands, and Spain.
The small number and the non-randomization of the studies pose some limitations to the findings. As well, the open-label nature of the studies, the risk of bias, and the limited literature from Canadian settings must be considered in interpreting the report. That being said, there was evidence that food delivery models that provided patients with increased flexibility in meal options and timing of meal delivery generally improved the nutritional intake of hospital inpatients.
The reviewed studies showed that food service changes help patients by giving them more flexible meal delivery times and more menu options. There is strong evidence that these changes lead to significant improvements in patients’ nutritional intake, such as energy and protein, compared to traditional food service models.
The new program, Ready Set Eat, is made possible through a generous one-time funding from the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital Foundation, in partnership with the Thistledown Foundation of $554,771.
“By working together with the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital Foundation and the Thistledown Foundation, we’re improving the hospital experience for children and families through the introduction of the Ready Set Eat program,” said Andrew Will, CEO of the Saskatchewan Health Authority. “This innovative approach to food services supports better nutrition, comfort, and recovery by making mealtime more flexible, more personal, and centred on patients’ food preferences.”
“Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital Foundation, the Thistledown Foundation, and generous donors across Saskatchewan are proud to fund this incredibly innovative program,” says Troy Davies, CEO of Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital Foundation. “The children at Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital are going through some of the toughest times in their lives. To give them the freedom to choose when and what they want to eat provides a sense of normalcy, helping our young patients feel a little more at home while they heal.”
The Thistledown Foundation is a private charitable foundation established in late 2019 by Shopify Inc. CEO Tobias Lütke and his spouse, Fiona McKean. The Foundation is “something we have been talking about for a long time. We got a small team together to look at the kinds of things that 20 years from now, we would wish we had done 20 years ago. Minimizing future regret drives almost every one of my decisions,” Lütke said.
A description of the Foundation says it was “established with the belief that solving complex engineering and scientific problems will unlock human potential and lead to a healthier and more abundant future.” The arrival of the pandemic expanded the Foundation’s outreach efforts to include investments into children’s health. In 2022, Canada’s Children’s Hospital Foundations (CCHF) and Children’s Healthcare Canada (CHC) announced a $26 million investment from the Thistledown Foundation to support Canada’s 13 acute care children’s hospitals across the country. The donation to Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital is further testimony that Thistledown Foundation continues to support children’s health.
The couple are comfortable remaining as much as possible, as quiet philanthropists, believing that there is an aspect of philanthropy that is just purer if it is anonymous. The Foundation has a very limited presence on the internet. McKean says they actively discourage the publication of their names as donors. “This is not a pat-me-on-the-back effort.”
“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t want or need credit for it,” Lütke noted in an interview with the Globe and Mail in 2020.
