Even prisoners eat better than patients

HoSpITAl food is shockingly poor, as anyone who has watched patients being fed will know. It’s a cop out to blame the fact it’s institutional food.

A few years ago I worked in a prison, and let me tell you the food the prisoners were served was far better than the awful gloop we dish out to patients in the NHS.

Now author and chef prue leith has spoken out about ‘inedible’ food being served to patients — she’s hardly the first and you would think after so many years of criticism that hospital cooks would have been embarrassed into improving their dishes.

Well no, for the simple reason cooks are a rare commodity in hospitals and this is the root of the problem.

The responsibility for providing hospital food has been increasingly outsourced to catering companies. This means meals are mass-produced off-site and transported into hospital where these ‘ cook- chill’ dishes are reheated or, more ominously, ‘regenerated’, Doctor Who- style, using selfcontained high-pressure steamers.

In a number of new hospitals built under private finance initiatives, such is the reliance on this type of food that there are no kitchens. This is in contract to many prisons, which prepare fresh food in proper kitchens.

This is all being done in the name of ‘efficiency’, but it’s a false economy: patients who are undernourished because they aren’t eating or the food is poor quality take longer to get better. It enrages me because it disproportionately affects the most vulnerable people in society — the elderly, those with mental health problems or learning disabilities who are more likely to be in hospital longer and who often don’t have lots of visitors bringing in extra food.

There is a simple solution: reinstate hospital kitchens and staff them with trained cooks. It can be done — Great ormond Street employs chefs who cut up vegetables and make meals. They’re nutritious and tasty.

In Cornwall, NHS trusts buy from local, sustainable sources. I hope prue keeps up her campaign.