Page 24 Daily Mail, Friday, September 6, 2019
teachers and nutritionists, but
NHS employees who can see what
the problems are in their own
hospitals and would like to suggest
solutions, yet are met by the deaf
ear of management.
There are caterers who are doing a
good job with satisfied^ customers,
doctors who believe that food can
be medicine, change-management
experts who think the culture in the
NHS needs a turnaround, catering
consultants pointing us to best
practice elsewhere.
Could, for example, a system used
in a hospital in Ede, in the Nether-
lands, work for us?
There, every patient is offered a
short, but varied, menu that is
tailored to his or her dietary needs
and personal taste, so no chance
of being confronted with a gluten-
heavy pudding if you have coeliac
disease, or meat pie and chips for a
heart attack victim.
The kitchen is on site and you can
order anything you like, at any time
of the day or night, and it comes
within 45 minutes.
We might not be able to offer
such luxury service, but, who
knows, we ought at least to find
a way to provide finishing kitchens
on each floor.
That way, staff could make fresh
toast, rustle up soup and a sand-
wich for someone who has missed a
meal, or boiled eggs and soldiers for
a patient finally awake and hungry
after a heavy anaesthetic and the
prolonged sleep that follows it, or
simply provide a cuppa and biscuit
for a worried patient who cannot
sleep. After all, kindness can be a
huge comfort.
The government review panel into
the state of our hospital food wasannounced in June, but is yet to
have its first meeting, so we don’t
have any answers just yet.
But we will get them, I hope, by the
end of January. And I am confident
that we mean business.
Phil Shelley, former chair of the
Hospital Caterers Association, is
busy recruiting his team. So far,
besides me, he has Henry Dimbleby,
who is the chair of Michael Gove’s
National Food Strategy.
Henry is doing wonders with
his charity Chefs In Schools, whose
goal is to place restaurant-trained
chefs in 100 schools; as well as an
impressive number of doctors and
administrators who have been try-
ing — and sometimes succeeding —
to improve food in their hospitals.
They are all committed and
determined to move mountains.
More importantly, so is the Gov-
ernment. In 50-something years
of campaigning for good school
food, for the teaching of cooking, forhealthier food in prisons, hospitals
and care homes, I have never before
felt that ‘them up there’ wanted
more than a photoshoot with a
celebrity chef and a bit of good
news with which to woo the public.
But this time, Matt Hancock, the
Health Secretary, personally wants
to see real change and realises that
words are not enough.
We will need real money to change
the culture, so that the NHS comes
to believe that good food can be a
positive thing and not just a drain
on assets.
It will also take cash to install
proper kitchens in hospitals and to
train everyone in new and better
ways. We are under no illusion about
the size of the challenge.
I once heard the head of a catering
company for hospitals talking ata conference, where he said: ‘How
would you like to work somewhere
where you must feed 1,000 or more
customers with 50 different diets,
religious taboos, cultural cuisines
and preferences, where they must all
be served at the same time, where
half of them are too ill to eat or don’t
have any appetite, where 60 per cent
of them are between the ages of 65
and 90, and not one of them wants
to be there in the first place?’
All the more reason why food
should be tailored to the individual
patient.
Next, there is the problem of
kitchens. Many large hospitals
ripped them out under the dis-
astrous private finance initiative,
when hospitals were contracted out
to the private sector, which paid
for their construction or overhaul.
In turn, those companies signed
long-term contracts, awarded not
on quality, but on price, with cater-
ers who agreed to cough up the
investment for replacing cooking
facilities with regeneration units
(warming-up ovens) and providing
central production units miles away.
So now, we are in a position
where minced, dehydrated pellets of
chicken, lamb or beef are imported
from the cheapest suppliers and
moulded into portions in a factory,
to be called up by the hospital and
‘regenerated’ in some cheap sauce.
This is not proper food.
An alarming 55 per cent of
the 140 million meals served to
patients every year are trucked in
from elsewhere.
My ninetysomething mother, in
the Royal Free Hospital in Hamp-
stead, North London, after a fall,
received such a meal one day.
As she lifted the cloche, a watery,
grey mass threatened to overflow
the plate. She quickly replaced it
and pushed aside the tray.
We now need to break those cater-
ing contracts and bring the cooking
— using fresh ingredients and trained
chefs — closer to the patient.
Personnel is another issue. Of
course, in a massive, complicated
business such as catering in the
NHS, you are not going to get starry
chefs in the kitchens worrying about
micro-leaf garnish, parmesan crisps
and yuzu drizzle. But, with the years
of assembling pre-made, often pre-by PRUE
LEITH
life
E
vER since I sat in the sunny
garden of No 10 with our
ebullient Prime Minister in
June, I have been inundated
with emails, posts and lettersabout the state of hospital food.
The complaints I have received since
becoming an adviser to the government
review into hospital food last month follow
a familiar pattern.
No toast for breakfast, or toast the texture of
pipe lagging; food and drinks put out of the
reach of patients; no food at all if you miss
lunch because you were having an X-ray;
flavourless food; cold food; disgusting-looking
food; food that comes in ‘prison trays’; food
that’s wrapped up and hard to unwrap; food
totally unfit for your diet or even dangerous
to your health; food that doesn’t accord with
your religion; food you simply don’t like.
And that’s not counting the patients who
wrote to tell me they were advised by kindly
nurses to get their relatives to feed them.
One patient, a diabetic, spent the day in
A&E, followed by X-ray, with no food at all,
despite telling everyone he might collapse. At
9pm, he was admitted to a ward and told he
had missed supper, but then a nurse arrived
bearing a cold tray of food.
‘You’re in luck,’ she said. ‘Someone in the next
ward just died — you can have his supper.’
NHS night-staff complain of vending
machines full of junk, with nothing hot or
healthy. visitors complain of poor-quality
restaurants and only chocolate bars, biscuits
and overpriced sandwiches in the foyers.
Of course, I hasten to add that there have
also been stout defenders of our hospitalfood. One of my former Leiths directors, who
knows a thing or two about catering, spent a
week in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
in London and was impressed with the fresh
fruit and vegetables, nicely cooked familiar
dishes and smiling staff.
But sadly, overall, the messages of praise
were wildly outnumbered by the complaints.
What impressed me the most, however, were
the offers of help, mostly from experienced
people with lots to give. Not just chefs, food‘We will need real
money to change
the culture’
‘55 pc of patients’
meals are trucked
in from elsewhere’
Picture: PA