Rochester & Elmore District Health Service

[Text displayed on screen] Rochester & Elmore District Health Service Cafe case study  

[Text displayed on screen] Anne McEvoy, CEO, Rochester and Elmore District Health Services. 

[Anne McEvoy, CEO, Rochester and Elmore District Health Services] Um, Rochester’s in northern Victoria, 25 k’s from Achuka and less than an hour from Bendigo.  

Our vision is leading our community to better health. Offering health benefits or health choices right across our organization was really about saying, this is something that we really should be doing in our organization.  

So there’s been a commitment at senior staff and then it basically was delegated down to some of our health promotion and kitchen staff who’ve really driven the initiatives.  

From an organizational perspective, we can’t force people to do things, so it’s about making small changes, but we’re, I suppose, influencing their thinking over time and educating them into what is a healthy choice, which the guidelines have helped the staff initiate and provide information to the community and people that they’re serving.  

If you have happy, healthy staff, the research shows that you will have better quality outcomes for patients and residents.  

[Text displayed on screen] Crystie Ballard, Health Promotion Officer, Rochester and Elmore District Health Services.  

[Crystie Ballard, Health Promotion Officer, Rochester and Elmore District Health Services] When I first started here and I looked at what we had at the cafe, I was a little bit shocked because being a health service and the only sort of food outlet within this hospital serving staff members, clients, patients who are also quite unwell, and then feeding them those sort of products that were quite high in fats and sugars, It just doesn’t make sense.  

So my role with implementing healthy Choices has really been sort of steering the project and leading it in the right direction and providing guidance to staff members on the ground.  

The biggest barrier is that people, as soon as you start making any change happen, they go straight to you’re. Taking away my choices.  

And the biggest thing to get that over the line was saying, we’re not actually taking away any choices, we’re actually providing more choices with bigger variety.  

And that actually made them say, oh, wait, we’ve actually got more products in here than what we used to have.  

They’ve got more variety, it’s more colorful, there’s heaps to choose from and they’ve continued coming back. One major thing is that people that actually haven’t purchased foods from the Cafe before now purchase foods every day.  

So to me, just looking at that, it’s huge. We’ve done our job. We probably had around 70% of our food items were from the red category. We now have over 50%, which are green and actually under 10% which are amber.  

So it’s been a massive shift, but it’s actually stayed the same as well. Why our staff are just keeping that momentum going.  

[Text displayed on screen] Rebecca O’Sullivan, Retail Manager, Rochester and Elmore District Health Services. 

[Rebecca O’Sullivan, Retail Manager, Rochester and Elmore District Health Services] We’re involved in making sure that we met that with our recipe items in the Cafe and checking them to make sure that they were green items.  

The healthy eating policy was designed by Christie, our health promotions officer.  

Catherine, our dietitian and myself, and we all joined together to try and make that a new policy that we could abide by.  

We also had to have a lot of communication with all our suppliers trying to get items that met the healthy guidelines as well, assessing our menu.  

We were in communication a lot with Healthy Eating Advisory Service.  

Once the food checker system come out, a lot of our staff check them themselves now. There was probably a lot of confusion when we first. Has changed as to how certain things could fit in.  

But the more staff training we did, and a lot of our casual staff did the training online as well, brought everyone sort of up to the same level.  

So the minute you walk into the cafe, you can see straight away what foods fit into what category with the green stickers on it and help you make that best choice.  

It doesn’t just take a health promotion officer to come in and tell you what you need to do.  

You need that commitment from your CEO, you need the commitment from management, but also the staff on the ground to make those changes. 

Don’t take on too much and don’t rush it and start small. Don’t give up. 

[Text displayed on screen] www.heas.health.vic.gov.au