OPINION: HOSPITAL FOOD
In the article entitled “From the Desk of the President”, I expressed the view that the food served to the patients at Palmerston North Hospital could only be described as – APPALLING. The question is, why make such a bold statement? Having spent 14 days in the hospital, being served up what was on offer and knowing a bit about food preparation and presentation I can speak with some degree of authority. I should also point out that I spent 5 years at one of the country’s top boarding schools. To this day I will not eat cabbage or custard or lambs fry, and my toast must be eaten hot from the toaster.
What we all need to understand is that the hospital staff, per se, do not prepare or serve the food that goes to the patients. The DHB has entered into a contract with a firm called Compass. It is not unusual for larger organisations to “contract out” services for reasons of so-called expediency or cost savings. However, in this case we need to ask: “where those cost savings are?” Compass Group NZ is a part of Compass Group plc, and is a British multinational contract food service company, headquartered in Chertsey, England.
Its revenue in 2020 was 19.94 billion GBP (Great Britain Pounds) and we are contributing to that. When contracts such as the one with MidCentral DHB are let it is recognised that a portion of the contract price goes off to the parent company as what is often called “head office contributions”. Often this can amount to >20% of the contract price. So that can be 20% of the money which, had the food supply been kept in house, could have been better spent on good quality produce and better service to patients. Instead, it is going off elsewhere!
Then we need to read through the PR spin from Compass Group NZ, and I quote: “we are specialists in enabling hospitals . . . . to unleash the power of food to heal, soothe and energise.
In hospitals, food is more than just part of the operation. It can touch lives, promote healing and transform the experience for both patients and visitors. For patients, we ensure that food is nutritious and safe.”
What an absolute load of “twaddle”. Those phrases are no more than PR spin and bear no resemblance to reality. Fourteen days of hospital food put paid to any thoughts of their food healing, soothing or energising. If the food that Compass supplies is so good, why then do so many families go outside the hospital and bring in fast food, salads or the fixings to make decent sandwiches? Inside the hospital stews and the like come tinged with a grey colour, a lunchtime ham and cheese pie arrived burnt black on the top, cauliflower is cooked until it is pink, broccoli is hardly cooked at all. In 14 days I never saw an ‘even’ warm piece of toast, meals are delivered in a mobile hot press along with the ice-cream (what happened to the common sense on that one?), sandwiches have filling in the centre where you can see down the cut-line but never on the edges, meats such as roast pork or silverside are sliced so thin that they turn to sawdust in the mouth and all of that assumes that you actually get what you asked for when your order was taken.
Despite what I have previously been told, with assurances that Compass is providing a quality product for a fair price, I have to say that my experience differs greatly from the PR spin or those assurances.
Some serious questions need to be asked of the DHB and Compass, as in my opinion, they are not meeting their obligations to their clients – the patients.
We believe it is time for a complaint to go to the Health and Disability Commissioner about the quality of the food services at Palmerston North Hospital and elsewhere across the New Zealand hospital sector. What do you think?