Thursday, 29 December 2011

Hospital Food

These are just a few observations from having been a patient in a NHS hospital twice for a week on each occasion in the past 5 years.  It is now called Croydon University Hospital, but still remains known to us as Mayday.

1.  I think that "Hospital Food" has been given a bad name, and whatever they do, the public will continue to consider it poor, no matter how much individual hospitals improve it.  We have become a nation of food snobs.  On these two occasions I have enjoyed the food.  The trouble is, if you say it is good, people raise their eyebrows and imagine that you don't eat very well at home.  In fact, I do, having a good cook for a husband.  And, luckily, one advantage of advanced age is that you don't care what people think.

2.  There are enormous difficulties, one being that, with short stays, you are likely to get the food ordered by the previous occupant of the bed.  I don't see how this can be avoided.

3.  If old people are asleep, someone tends to fill in the form for them, and, afraid of ordering too little, order too much.  I noticed in Mayday staff waking them and encouraging them to eat, but it's almost impossible for a hospital to provide carers with the time to coax them.  They waste so much.  Also, the servings are too big and discourage them.

4.  If you are ill you are likely to have a poor appetite.  If you don't feel like eating when you get the menu sheet and order little, you are encouraged to order more in case your appetite returns.

5.  Many ethnic minorities so much prefer their own home-cooked food that families bring it in for them.  I don't know if they also order from the menu.  Possibly some do and that gets wasted.

6.  On my latest stay in Mayday a researcher came round and asked me if my meal times were ever interrupted by nurses or doctors.  I said no, but if they were wouldn't mind, considering myself there to be cured and their time more important than one meal for me.

7.  Does it really make sense, even, in the long run, financially, to have a branch of Burger King as part of the restaurant service?  The sight of a very overweight patient in  his pyjamas eating there was a very disturbing one.

I wonder if it would be possible to have a trolley on each floor and patients could ask for what they want from it according to how they were feeling at that moment?

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