Keywords :
Manpower, Out sourcing, Dietary services, Cost containment.

ABSTRACT
Tertiary care hospitals are labor and cost-intensive. To maintain the quality with efficiency of hospital services is the prime concern with resources being scarce. It was becoming difficult for the in-house dietary dept. to cope up with increasing workload. Financial crunch, indiscipline, absenteeism, labor union problems, pilferages, etc are also the main bottlenecks with the regularly employed hospital staff. With this view point, the 1500-bedded tertiary care hospital located at Chandigarh, floated the concept of outsourcing the hospital dietary services in its newly developed advanced centers and got favorable outcome, accomplishing the objectives of the Institute.

Comparative analysis of financial expenditure for in-house dietary services was done with outsourced dietary services. The results have shown that the cost of meal per day for in-house dietary service is Rs. 70.49/- as compared to Rs. 43.30/- per day to the diet outsourced i.e. in-house diet costs 62.80% (Rs. 27.19/-) more than the outsourced, service which is quite substantial. If in-house services are also outsourced it will save huge revenues i.e. 38.50% (Rs. 1,09,20,225/-), saving on the expenditures what the hospital is bearing at present. The quality aspects were studied under different parameters from meals preparation till presentation to patients; and results concluded that the services outsourced are better than the ‘‘in house’’ services.