Diversity at QUA Nutrition: Helping us in making a nutritional impact

QUA Nutrition is India’s largest chain of nutrition clinics with over 60 dieticians. Our team represents 17 different states in India and has knowledge of 24 languages. Our DIVERSITY makes us stand apart. There are so many beautiful minds at work together & the ideas that pop out of our conversations & discussions are amazing. It also helps us understand and respect different cultures, the diversity in foods, varied eating habits, physical ability & unique characteristics. When all this comes together the client gets premium service experience.

When you are able to relate with your client, interpersonal care gets more effective and compliance increase. We had a fascinating time during the holy month of Ramadan. A lot of clients comes to us during this period get a nutrition plan for them so that they can observe the fast in a healthy way. A lot of them also have existing medical conditions, but they decide to fast for Ramadan and they seek our help for this noble cause. The challenge for us was to make nutrition recommendations very specific. This is where my wonderful team helped each other out. My fellow dietitians who belong to Muslim brotherhood conducted knowledge sessions for all the team to help us understand intricacies involved in Ramadan which allowed us to serve our clients better.

One of my dietitian who is from Tibet arranged a nutrition seminar for Tibetan community in Bangalore. That day I was able to touch upon life of few people who I never in my dreams thought of be able to.

At QUA Nutrition we have a broad view of what healthy eating looks like and it is inclusive of various cultures. So if our client is open to trying different cuisines then a person from the south can easily find rajma chat in his diet plan or a person from the north would be advised to start his day with a plate of Idli. The team shares different food ideas with each other & then we do in-depth research to find out the best food alternatives for our client.

When you overcome the language barrier and provide the freedom to your clients to speak in their mother tongue the impact is imminent. They are able to connect, they are able to express themselves freely and the communication is far meaningful. We have few instances at our clinic where the fellow dietitian who was not specialized to handle that particular case actually worked as a mediator between the assigned dietitian and the person for effective communication. While I am writing this, I am thinking of adding ‘language knowledge’ as one of my priority selection criteria while hiring new dietitians. My HR team is going to get a call from me tomorrow morning.

With collective hive learning of 60 dietitians, its not one mind, it’s a whole team who feeds to each other’s learning, knowledge & growth, so it works much better.

Qua in latin means “in capacity of” and we adhere to this philosophy, but our commitment to serve diverse culture to bring a change is probably one such scenario when we actually choose to go beyond our individual capacity to be able to relate to all with a single minded focus on the changing the way they eat.

Ryan Fernando is an Award-winning celebrity Sports Nutritionist with 2GUINNESS world record and 2 Olympic medals under his belt. His client list include Olympic wrestler Sushil Kumar, cricketer Shikhar Dhawan & bollywood superstars Aamir Khan & Abhishek Bachchan. He is CEO & Chief Nutritionist at QUA Nutrition Signature Clinics.