I am glad you could join us as a Senior Dietitian at the Westside Teen Nutrition Clinic. I have some important supervisory work that I need you to do right away. But before I launch into the first project I have for you, I thought it might be helpful for you to know a little background on our clinic.

The Westside Teen Nutrition Clinic
Our mission is to deliver top-notch nutritional care to our clients in a safe, supportive and friendly environment. We work with teens to help them maintain healthy active lifestyles, and empower them to make smart nutritional choices for themselves.

Teenagers have a lot on their plates, so to speak. They often don’t have time to stop and think about what they put into their bodies. That’s where we come in. We consider client education to be a key component of our service. Teenagers are bright; they don’t change their eating patterns just because we tell them they should. They need a reasonable explanation before they will buy in to changing their ways.

Our job as nutritional advisors (the title for our various practitioners) is to:

• assess our clients’ nutritional needs and goals
• develop appropriate nutritional plans clients can and want to follow
• educate clients so they develop the ability to make healthy nutritional choices

Goals of Healthy Eating
At the clinic, our goal is to help our clients become healthy eaters for life. Healthy eating not only involves making the right food choices, but includes psychological components as well. Choosing the appropriate amount of food, providing a balanced and varied diet, and maintaining a healthy weight are the foundation of healthy nutrition. More subtle but equally important goals include promoting family mealtimes that strengthen emotional bonds, fostering confidence and self-control when making good food choices, and encouraging the ability to adapt to a variety of eating situations while still eating healthfully.

Your Job
I’d like you to do a performance review of a couple of our nutrition advisors here at the clinic, as part of a clinic-wide effort to ensure our practitioners are providing our clients the highest quality of care. We aim to achieve 100% client satisfaction, and generally we do a great job. However, we have had some clients who were not satisfied. Those are the cases I want you to review. I need you to figure out why they were unhappy and to coach the practitioners on how to do their jobs better.

Given the range of experience levels of the nutritional advisors that work at our clinic - - from student interns to nutritionists to registered dietitians - - we are at some risk for inconsistent quality. Therefore, we regularly observe each other’s work, gather client feedback, and look for ways to improve our performance. Through teamwork, we achieve excellence.

I’d like you to get started on your first task right away. I’ll send you an email shortly with the details on where to begin.

I look forward to working with you.

Pat Niren
Head Dietitian
Westside Teen Nutrition Clinic