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Sibongile Maruta Herald Reporter
Government on Thursday launched the Zimbabwe Hospital Food Services Association, which is aimed at strengthening and upholding health care ethics, care services for families and society and taking greater care over health services management interventions.

Speaking at the launch in Harare, Minister of Health and Child Care Dr David Parirenyatwa said: “The great challenge of this launch is to give voice and appeal to the world about the health practitioner called hospital food service supervisor or manager whose experiences go unnoticed, whose words go unheard.

“The association is constituted of technical practitioners (Hospital Food Services – HFSS), then Institutional Domestic Supervisors who are the product for the Ministry of Health and Child Care.

“The thrust of this practitioner is to provide quality food services for curative, rehabilitative and restorative therapies. Embedded in this technical profession are a host of skill and core competences.”

He explained the roles of the technical practitioner, which include translating dietary prescriptions into nutritionally adequate and curative meals through quality food services management interventions.

Dr Parirenyatwa said the association has a vision to develop core competencies such as deepening analytical skills, broadening policy implementation skills, honing communication skills, to inculcate cultural competency skills, developing community dimension of practice skills, shaping basic public health science skills, building financial and management skills and utilising leadership and systems thinking skills.

Hospital Food Service Association president Mr Louis Gremu said: “We want to harmonise our operations as food service to bring unity in terms of standardising all our work processes as a department in the whole country. We should come together as one and represent the patients that we stand for.

“Our work is curative rather than preventative. We work with nutritionists who work with the community. We are advocating for standards in the Ministry of Health that can be recognised from an international point of view that can spread to all hospitals in the country.

He said there is need to advocate for enough resources from the ministry to help improve diets in hospitals.