The Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust (RUH) serves around 2,000 meals a day to patients, staff and visitors. The kitchens are very busy environments, with lots of bulk cooking based on locally sourced ingredients wherever possible.
“We're very keen to ensure our catering provides nutritional meals to help our patients get better quicker,” says Philip Watson, head of facilities at the RUH.
“The challenges of hospital catering at the RUH Bath are to produce a large number of meals at the same time, serving them across a large site,” he adds.
“We need to do that with a good speed of service and in a very cost effective manner. We also need to ensure the quality of cooking is high. RATIONAL appliances have helped us achieve all this and more, increasing the volume of food we produce in the time available.”
The RUH's main kitchen has five VarioCookingCenters and five
SelfCookingCenters, while the smaller south kitchen, catering for visitors and staff, has one of each appliance. The kitchen brigade regularly use their appliances in tandem. “We’ll start the cooking process in the VarioCookingCenter and finish in the SelfCookingCenter,” says Lee Johnston, food production manager at the RUH. “For cauliflower cheese, we use the SelfCookingCenter to steam the cauliflower al dente, while we make the sauce in the VarioCookingCenter. We pour the sauce over the cauliflower, then pop it into the SelfCookingCenter® to brown it off beautifully.”
Both appliances use the same control panel, which has helped staff to quickly get familiar with the RATIONAL technology. “It’s very simple to program the cooking processes for specific dishes into the appliances, so that we can ensure consistency across our food products. The processes save time too. This means we can cook to a tighter timeline and, when it’s time to serve, our customers enjoy a better, fresher meal.”
The RUH makes use of RATIONAL ConnectedCooking system, which allows the appliances to be monitored remotely, by managers, chefs and service personnel, via a PC, tablet or even on a smartphone. “ConnectedCooking also enables us to create and share cooking processes,” says Philip. “We have seasonal menus that change regularly. ConnectedCooking gives us the ability to change and update the automatic cooking processes on multiple appliances.
“RATIONAL has enabled us, as a team to provide an improved service to the patients, visitors and the staff that we feed every day. We’ve managed to do this more efficiently, more effectively, and the support offered by RATIONAL is second to none.”