‘Do not give vulnerable patients any sandwiches’
VULNERABLE hospital patients should not be given sandwiches and salads because of the risk of infection, the sandwich-makers’ industry body said yesterday.
Jim Winship, director of the British Sandwich Association (BSA), said some hospitals did not store food at sufficiently cold temperatures, allowing bacteria to grow.
Speaking as the number of deaths in the listeria outbreak rose to five, Mr Winship said chilled foods such as sandwiches should not be served to patients with lowered immunity.
‘Listeria occurs naturally in some foods like salad leaves – you can’t get away from it entirely and there is no regime that can kill it off completely.
‘We have expressed concern for some time that a lot of the products being served in hospitals contain risky ingredients that should not be eaten by vulnerable groups – patients that are very ill, with suppressed immunity. There is also a bigger issue of the mishandling of products on wards.’
Mr Winship said guidelines stated that chilled food should be kept at strict temperatures, between 5 and 8C (41-46F), but cited a survey carried out three years ago which found one hospital fridge was running at 25C (77F). ‘That was shocking. Also, often patients don’t want to eat food immediately after it is brought around, so it can be lying by their bedside for long periods. But the NHS won’t be very keen to talk about their mishandling [of food] because they will be worried about liability in that situation.’
Mr Winship said some members were thinking about no longer supplying hospitals because of the risk involved.
Kaarin Goodburn, director of the Chilled Food Association, said patients were dying because sandwich suppliers to the NHS were not being forced to adhere to the strict requirements of those supplying major retailers.
Miss Goodburn said Westminster’s Department of Health should stop ‘people being killed by food they have effectively been fed by the Government’.
‘This is a national scandal, it’s been going on for 20 years, ever since the first listeria outbreak at an NHS hospital. These NHS suppliers do not meet the same strict standards regarding shelf life, hygiene, cleaning and disinfecting that are required by those supplying all the main high street retailers.’
The Food Standards Agency said its guidance was that while ‘there is the potential for chilled ready-to-eat foods to present an increased risk to vulnerable groups’, these could be addressed with ‘effective controls’.