Avaliação Qualitativa das Preparações do Cardápio oferecido em uma Unidade de Alimentação e Nutrição do Município de Monteiro-PB.

Abstract

The Hospital Food and Nutrition Unit is defined as one of the most important subareas of hospitals, as it integrates a set of dietary therapy actions, from planning, purchasing, storage, preparation to distribution of meals, which, in addition to dietary therapy demands, seeks to maintain and promote the health of service employees. As a result, some strategies have been used that can help with menu planning and evaluation, highlighting the Qualitative Assessment of Menu Preparations (AQPC) method, which is a tool used to assess the nutritional quality of menu preparations prepared under various criteria. aspects. In the meantime, this work aimed to evaluate the quality of the menu preparations offered to

employees of a Public Hospital UAN. An exploratory, quantitative-descriptive, cross- sectional research was carried out during the month of March 2022, in a Hospital UAN, over

the course of 28 days. The lunch and dinner menus served to employees were analyzed by the AQPC, which verifies criteria such as colors, offer of fruits, leafy vegetables, sweets, isolated frying and associated with sweets, sulfurized foods, fatty meats, and repetition of the main course. At lunchtime, there was no fruit, sweets and sweets accompanied by fried foods, but leafy vegetables (50%), monotony of colors (57.1%), high levels of sulphur-containing foods (100%), presence of fried foods (100%) and fatty meat on 35.6% of the days and repetition of the main course (100%). At the dinner meal, there was no fruit and leafy vegetables, repetition of colors (100%), high supply of sulphur-containing foods (60.7%), high supply of fried foods (67.7%), absence of sweets and sweets associated with frying, offering fatty meat on 17.8% of the analyzed days and repeating the main course on 100%. From the results observed in this study, a considerable occurrence of negative aspects can be noticed, such as the absence of fruits, high frequency of fried foods, fatty meats and monotony of colors, thus pointing to the need to better menu planning, with the aim of to improve the quality and variety of preparations.