Depressing proof ‘home cooked’ does NOT make hospital food any easier to stomach

After the furore over NHS meals made in factories miles away ...

Anourishing diet is a vital part of any patient’s recovery — but too often meals fed to seriously ill patients in hospital fail to provide basic standards of nutrition, as good health found in this experiment.

Furthermore, as our grim pictures show, many do little to whet the appetite either.

The standard of hospital catering has come into the spotlight again following the recent deaths of six patients from listeria contracted after eating hospital sandwiches and salads.

That was followed last month by revelations that some patients are eating hospital food initially cooked up to a year earlier in a factory, before being frozen and shipped to hospitals as far as 650 miles away.

This, say campaigners, is symptomatic of a lack of importance placed by many hospitals on the vital role that food can play in health and recovery.

indeed, ‘pigswill’ and ‘unfit for dogs’ are just some of the criticisms of hospital food recorded by patients, according to the Campaign for Better hospital Food, conducted by the charity sustain.

‘hospital food isn’t up to scratch,’ says rob Percival, head of food and policy at the soil Association, which has developed awards for hospital catering.

‘There is currently no monitoring of hospital food standards and no checks to ensure that hospitals are making it easy for patients, staff and visitors to eat well.’

A recent poll by unison, the health workers’ union, found that even hospital staff would not touch some of the dishes served up to patients.

But can the food really be that bad? To

find out, we asked patients to send details of their meals for a snapshot survey of the state of hospital food around Britain.

Patients being treated for a wide variety of health issues in hospitals up and down the uK photographed their evening meal within a three-day period at the beginning of this month.

The meals were then assessed by hannah Whittaker, an nhs dietitian and a spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association.

she explains: ‘it’s very important for patients to get a good balance between protein for repair and growth, carbohydrate for energy, and vegetables or fruit for vitamins and minerals and fibre.

‘in general, for a main meal, a quarter of the plate should be protein, a quarter veg and half carbohydrates. Presentation and portion size is also really important as it can heavily influence whether a patient will attempt to eat their meal.’

While some hospitals are offering patients tempting and nourishing meals, others are serving up food so poor that patients would rather go hungry.

We also found that some meals the patients thought awful were nutritionally spot on — although that matters little if patients are unable to bring themselves actually to eat the food.

so look for yourselves and see if you can spot the home-cooked food from the meals that have been shipped in and reheated. The answers may surprise you.