Development and Verification of Indicators for a Foodservice & Nutrition Management Evaluation at a Hospital Nutrition Department

ABSTRACT

The purposes of this study were to develop the standard indicators to evaluate the food and nutrition systems in hospitals and to test the validity of those items scientifically. The results were as follows First, the conceptual validity was examined with recognition degrees of importance from the hospital nutrition department managers. All of the hospital nutrition department's operation evaluation standards and the indicators' conceptual validity tested were in the range of 3.71~4.93 out of 5.0, and the mean score was 4.36. Therefore, the conceptual validity was verified. Second, to verify the factor validity of the items of the standards and indicators for the hospital nutrition department's operation evaluation, the standards and indicators were analyzed as key-factors. Key-factor analysis after vertical rotation showed that four factors appeared and were composed of (a) facilities management, (b) sanitation management, (c) operation & foodservice management, and (d) nutrition management. Third, the reliability of the standards and indicators for the hospital nutrition department's operation evaluation was analyzed and resulted in a score of 0.98, which showed good internal consistency. Fourth, the discriminative power of each item of the standards for the hospital nutrition department's operation evaluation was tested by checking the differences between groups with first quartile and forth quartile of total evaluation scores. The indicators having low distinction power were modified into obligatory items or eliminated for better differentiation.