Food For Thought

Joan has a BS in Dietetics from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and did her internship at the University Of Oregon Medical School. Joan comes from a family of siblings that are employed in the health care field: a brother is a physician, and a sister is a renal dietitian. She chose dietetics thinking that it would provide employment on a long term basis. According to Joan, "everyone's got to eat, even if we're in outer space, we still need to eat and have good nutrition!" She even influenced her sister to switch studies from pharmacy to dietetics.

Joan had 20 years of food service management experience at several hospitals before joining HMC. Her challenge in her first job was to elicit cooperation from some long term dietary employees for implementing changes, and later as an experienced RD, her challenges were to be creative and strive for quality meals while doing more with less as budgets were getting cut. When Joan left her food service management company, she chose HMC because of her belief in the philosophy of getting good minds together, and for the support of the other RDs and HMC staff. Another influence for Joan to join long term care consulting was the aging of the baby boomers and the increased need for dietitians in this field. With some clinical re-training, she was up and running as a consultant. Joan particularly likes offering her expertise with her recommendations and watching her facilities improve. She feels one of the biggest challenges in consulting now is working with the different state surveyors and trying to stay on top of their regulatory interpretations!  Joan has enjoyed her association with HMC and feels Lee has really progressed the company as the leader in the industry, with such a wealth of knowledge of the regulations and legislative climate and has kept the company on the cutting edge with use of computerized reports on the website and the RDNews.

Here is some other interesting information about Joan:

"One area that most people don't know about me is that I am Vice President of my husband's corporation..Adan & Company Landscape. I also have my landscape contractor's license, but don't really use it; I just have it in case I need to take over his business if something happens to him... I have tried to marry the two fields together, by having my facilities plant a vegetable or herb garden although I haven't had a lot of success. I have found that it takes a specific type of residents for a gardening project as well as facility support. I am hoping that as culture change takes place, facilities will take on gardening projects as an activity and then serve their vegetables (or fruits like strawberries, yum) on the menu as a featured item. I will continue to pursue facility gardening projects for the spring time."