Hospitals must ban the muffin menace

IF THE idea of an obese nurse shaking her maracas is your thing, then you’re in luck. Because NHS staff could soon be descending on a zumba class near you.

At least, that’s the plan outlined this week by Simon Stevens, head of the NHS.

In a bid to tackle obesity on the wards, he’s decreed that exercise and fitness classes should be made available to employees battling the bulge.

Personally, I’m not convinced it’s the best use of taxpayers’ money when we can’t afford basic, life-saving treatments. I’m also not sure when he thinks NHS staff are going to find the time to go, given that — from my experience — they can barely find time to do the jobs they’re paid for.

But Mr Stevens also made another interesting suggestion: banning junk food from NHS hospitals. On this, I completely agree.

It’s an embarrassment patients are being told to eat properly and avoid high-sugar, processed junk, then, as soon as they walk out of the clinic and into the hospital foyer, they’re confronted with a fast-food outlet.

So why have hospitals let in these burger bars and coffee shops selling muffins? It all began after the introduction of the ‘internal market’ in the late Nineties, when trusts were expected to supplement their income from canny commercial activity.

It’s this need to develop incomegenerating schemes that’s behind the contracting-out of car parking and bedside telephone and TV systems. But it also brought us the privately owned restaurants, newsagents and coffee shops that make hospital lobbies resemble out-of-town shopping malls.

The companies who manage these facilities can charge premium rates because they know they have a captive market. A coffee at my hospital canteen cost me £2.60 yesterday — yet before the place was ‘modernised’ a few years ago, it was 50p.

I can’t be the only one who misses the old League of Friends shops. Not only did they provide a sense of the hospital being part of the community, but the rock-hard buns the volunteers made were so inedible there was no chance of getting fat.