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Set Your Meal Preferences & Appetite

The Meal preferences page lets you tell the hospital’s dietary team what you like to eat and how hungry you feel today — from your own phone, without waiting for someone to come by. It usually takes a minute or two.

Set your preferences

  1. From your Today page, open Meal preferences.
  2. Check the top of the page. Under Current stay you can see your hospital, unit, and room, so you know your choices go to the right kitchen. You may also see a Meal options line naming the menu your hospital serves you.
  3. Under Standing preferences, tick the boxes that describe how you usually eat — choices like vegetarian, no pork, or low sodium. The list you see is the one your hospital offers.
  4. Under Appetite today, choose Regular appetite, Small appetite, or No appetite.
  5. If you would rather not have the next meal at all, tick Skip this meal.
  6. Use Anything else for dietary staff? to add a short note about anything the checkboxes do not cover.
  7. Select Save meal preferences. The page shows “Meal preferences saved.” when your choices go through.

What happens after you save

Your choices go to the hospital’s dietary team, who prepare meals from what you saved. Your usual preferences are remembered — the next time you open the page, your saved choices are already filled in, so you only change what is different today.

You’ll see a short reminder that updates are reviewed before your hospital’s cutoff for that meal. If you make a change after the cutoff, it is still saved and the dietary team still sees and reviews it, though it may arrive too late for the very next meal.

A few things to know

Meal preferences are available only while you are staying in the hospital. If your stay has ended, the page tells you so instead of showing the form.

This page is not for urgent needs. If you need help right away, use your call button or contact staff.