Food lapse rectified at Sallisaw Nutrition Center

As the proverb observes, there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, and the Sallisaw Nutrition Center found that out the last week of June during its changeover in nutrition providers.

That slip resulted in seniors having to make an emergency run to the grocery store to buy food with their own money in order to provide lunch for the final week MC Nutrition Services was the provider for Eastern Oklahoma Development District (EODD).

“We’ve got a new boss over there now, a new company took over our place starting today,” doeverything senior Robert Morris told the Sequoyah County Commissioners at their July 1 meeting. “Last week, y’all didn’t know anything about it, and we didn’t know anything about it until later, that we didn’t have any food to eat.

“So the workers — the hands and the cooks and some of the others — went in together with money — they used their own money — and they went out and bought food for us, and then brought it back and cooked. What we had lasted until about Thursday. Then the council heard about it, we didn’t know anything about it either, and Friday didn’t have no food. So we went and ordered food ourselves and served everybody, served workers and ourselves, too, and paid it out of our own money,” Morris told the commissioners.

The Sallisaw Nutrition Center, through its nutrition provider, serves lunch for seniors Monday through Friday, and delivers meals to those who are homebound.

“It sounds like there was a little bit of lapse in service there — the old company didn’t take care of service there until the new took over,” District 3 Commissioner Jim Rogers speculated. He noted that District 1 Commissioner Ray Watts sits on the EODD board, and promised “we’ll do what we can” to arrange reimbursement for the food purchased.

“They went out and didn’t have to do it, but they did it because they love us and they care about us,” Morris said of those who made sure seniors received their expected lunch. “And when people do that, we are to award them and help them, too, and be nice to them. We’ll just wait and see how this new company works, and hope it does real good.”

Well, Morris and the Sallisaw Nutrition Center have found that things are going better with new nutrition provider DOCServices from Miami, Okla. Morris said Monday that the lapse that occurred during the last week of June has been remedied, and “things have been pretty good; better food. We’ll just have to wait and see. It may turn out to be great.”

He said the food served by the previous provider “wasn’t that good. It was the same old thing almost every day or every other day — chicken casserole or something with chicken.”

Despite improvements since July 1, Morris still has reservations about the new provider, challenges that have become commonplace at the Sallisaw Nutrition Center.

“We’re gonna wind up having to do exactly what we did before. We’re gonna have to buy extra stuff that we need to get by on. They don’t buy the coffee, tea, creamer, stuff like that. The council does that,” Morris said, who has been involved with the center since 1999 and sits on the council that advocates for seniors.

“We do a lot of our stuff on our own — just like we go out and sell tickets on quilts,” he said, noting that items like jewelry and quilts are available for sale to support the Sallisaw Nutrition Center. “We don’t waste the money. We spend it for what we need, emergency cases.”

EODD executive director Scott Harding is in no small part responsible for ensuring DOCServices provide the nutrition services expected.

“We hadn’t gotten any reports on that particular site, them being out of food,” Harding said last week in response to an inquiry by Your TIMES. “We’re going to look into these allegations about the meals and try to verify. And if they were without meals, we’ll do everything we can to try to verify if there were days they didn’t have meals or weren’t serving meals.

“I already talked to our Area Agency on Aging director, and she’s aware now, when I was, that this might be an issue. She’s going to look into that and see if we can verify. And I talked to Commissioner Ray Watts and let him know, too,” Harding said, assuring that “we should be able to pay receipts for any food if there wasn’t any other food available.”

Harding said EODD is “excited about the new project,” and that the oversight agency doesn’t foresee any problems with DOCServices as the nutrition provider.

“We’ve been trying to make sure that the transition goes as smoothly as possible. We have the utmost confidence in the new project,” Harding said of DOCServices. “Obviously this was a hiccup that we weren’t aware of, and certainly would have, had we known, taken some steps to prevent that. We’ll try to remedy as best we can now, and then moving forward, make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Harding explained that EODD has broad oversight of the service providers, and the agency administers financial dealings and reimbursements for the nutrition providers, and ensures “they’re compliant with all the state guidelines.”

Harding said DOCServices is an established provider that has been handling nutrition services for about 30 years.

The nutrition services company provides services to individuals age 60 and older, which include congregate meal sites, home-delivered meals, homemaker services, transportation, outreach, and nutrition education and counseling by a registered dietician. The social and nutritional services to seniors and caregivers in the organization’s service area stems from the Older Americans Act, which was established in 1965.