Jean is the Dietary Department Director of a large licensed long term care facility. She keeps statistics which indicate a serious problem with the number of patient meals that are discarded and replaced daily. This has been averaging 25 meals a day for the past year. She knows that the food and paper ware cost her approximately $3.00 per meal and she realizes that it takes approximately 30 minutes of dietary staff time to retrieve the discarded meal, create a new meal tray and return it to the patient. The nursing staff is also complaining because they must take time to respond to the patient/family complaint and call dietary to order a new tray and then follow up to make sure a new tray that meets the patient’s needs has been delivered. It requires 15 minutes of the time of a registered nurse to carry out these tasks. Nurses are paid $30 an hour and dietary aides make $15 an hour. Both groups also receive benefits that cost the facility 25% of salary dollars. Jean wants to get management attention so she can obtain their support and the resources needed to determine and remove the causes of this nonconformance. She decides to determine what not addressing this problem is costing the facility annually.
Act as Jean’s consultant and help her
a) Determine the best PONC calculation method to use
b) complete the full calculation and
c) identify the ripple costs which should be included in her analysis either within the calculation or in addition to it.