Hospitals need real food that’s cooked by real chefs

AFEW weeks ago, I got talking to a minicab driver who, it turned out, used to be an NHS hospital cook. He told me he had left because he was sick of doing little more than microwaving pre-packaged meals for patients.

‘at least with driving, I’m using a skill,’ he said rather glumly.

I thought of that taxi driver this week as it was revealed some NHS hospitals are spending as little as £3 a day per patient on food.

Of all the places you’d expect a decent meal, it’s in a hospital. I’m not talking haute cuisine, but given the importance of nutrition in helping people make a speedy recovery, you’d at least assume hospital food would be given proper thought and attention. Yet, this often isn’t the case. Reheated, reconstituted pap is all too common in hospitals in this country, and it’s got to stop.

It’s not always what’s on the menu that’s the problem, but rather what’s not. a few years ago, I was working on a dementia ward when I saw that one of the patients, an elderly woman in her 80s, was very distressed. She was shouting that one of the patients had stolen her banana.

I assumed she was simply confused and agitated. She was sitting in the lounge with a nurse next to her. ‘ You’ve eaten it already,’ the nurse was trying to explain. ‘I haven’t, he’s taken it,’ she shouted, pointing to another patient sitting watching TV.

‘I never touched her bloody banana,’ he shouted back.

‘Don’t worry,’ said my consultant, who had come to see what all the fuss was about, ‘we’ll get you another banana.’

He looked at the nurses, but there was an embarrassed silence.

‘erm, no, we can’t I’m afraid — we’ve had all the ones we’re allowed for today,’ one of the nurses told him. ‘That’s why she hides them under her pillow.’

Yes, the patient had taken to hiding fruit from other patients because it was so prized. The shortage of fruit on the ward, the nurse went on to explain, was because the hospital trust had decided it needed to make cut-backs.

How anyone can justify withholding fresh fruit from sick people is beyond me. But our ward, where there were 15 patients, was allowed just three bananas a day. The nursing staff had taken to either cutting them up so that everyone could get some, or rationing them for each patient over the week.

The ward also got two apples a day, but as most of the patients had dentures or bad teeth, they were traded with other wards for more bananas. an orange had yet to make an appearance.

HERE was a group of people for whom fresh fruit would do the world of good, who are actually clamouring for it, but for whom it was being rationed. It was, if you’ll excuse the pun, totally bananas.

and, of course, the quality of the food people do get is often pitiful. You’d think hospital cooks would have been embarrassed into improving the dishes being served up — but no, for the simple reason that cooks are now a rare commodity in hospitals.

Instead, the responsibility for providing food has been increasingly outsourced to catering companies. It means meals are mass-produced off-site and then reheated on the wards — or, as it’s more ominously described by the industry, ‘regenerated’.

This is all being done in the name of ‘efficiency’. But it’s a false economy. Patients who are undernourished because they can’t eat the food they’re offered take longer to get better and spend more time in hospital.

and it enrages me because it disproportionately affects the weakest, most vulnerable patients — the elderly and those with mental health problems or learning disabilities who often don’t have lots of people visiting them and bringing in extra food.

There is a simple solution: reinstate hospital kitchens and staff them with trained cooks. When we spend so much on cutting-edge treatments and drugs, surely it makes sense to spend a little more on one of the most important medicines of all. food.