Daily Mail investigation supports calls for hospital food to be independently monitored

An investigation by the Daily Mail [1] has revealed that hospital food inspections are failing to reflect the true quality of hospital meals and patient concerns about what they’re being fed. 

The Mail’s revelations echo the findings of a new briefing called ‘Time to come clean about hospital food’, published today by the Campaign for Better Hospital Food [2]. It shows that hospital food inspections regularly award patient meals an approval rating of more than 90%, when it is calculated by the independent Care Quality Commission to be closer to 50% [3]. It also finds that hospitals are wrongly declaring that they are meeting the government’s “legally-binding” basic food standards [4], published in August 2014 [5].

Two other briefings published by the Campaign today, called ‘Keep hospitals cooking’ [2] and ‘Making more of the money we spend on hospital food’ [2], reveal that:

• Patients prefer meals which have been cooked by NHS staff in the hospital’s own kitchen [6], and that preparing and cooking food in this way could cost hospitals less than buying delivered ready meals which are reheated before being served on the ward [7].
• Only £4 of every £10 pounds (40%) spent by taxpayers’ every year on hospital food is likely to meet the Department of Health’s ‘compulsory nutritional and quality’ standards [8]. And with concerns about the accuracy of the results of hospital food inspections, campaigners believe that the number of NHS Trusts meeting the standards may even be less than this [3].

Only last week, a YouGov survey of more than 1,550 NHS patients and visitors found that there is low level of awareness of the government’s hospital food changes. It also found that one in three of those surveyed said that the food wasn’t tasty and more than half of those surveyed said that hospital food should be more nutritious [8].

Alex Jackson, Co-ordinator of the Campaign for Better Hospital Food, said: “The results of the Daily Mail’s hospital food investigation help to support the findings of our own research, which informs our three briefings published today. It’s clear from both our and the Daily Mail’s publications that the government has to take immediate action to address the weaknesses in its hospital food proposals. 

It can help to improve patient meals and restore our faith in hospital catering by doing three urgent things. These are to hand responsibility for the monitoring of hospital food to an independent body, such as the Care Quality Commission; bring back hospital kitchens so that freshly cooked food can be made on-site, and strengthen the “legally-binding” food standards which now apply to hospital food.”

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For more information and interviews, please contact: Alex Jackson on Mob: 07734 902909, or by email at alex@sustainweb.org. 

Notes to Editor

[1] Try not to choke - but health bosses say we love hospital food, Daily Mail, 3 February 2015
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2936982/Try-not-choke-health-bosses-say-love-hospital-food.html 

[2] For more information about the Campaign for Better Hospital Food please visit www.hospitalfood.org.uk. The three briefings published today can be downloaded at:
•    Keep hospitals cooking www.sustainweb.org/publications/keep_hospitals_cooking_2015 
•    Time to come clean about hospital www.sustainweb.org/publications/time_to_come_clean
•    Making more of the money we spend on hospital food www.sustainweb.org/publications/better_spending_on_hospital_food 

[3] As part of the research for our Time to come clean about hospital food briefing we randomly selected a sample of ten NHS Acute Trusts in England to compare data from their hospital food inspections (called Patient Led Assessments of the Care Environment (PLACE)) against the results of recent Care Quality Commission surveys of patients at the same Trust. This comparison shows that the average PLACE assessment approval rating for hospital food is 92.99%, while only 56% (5.6 out of 10) of patients surveyed by the Care Quality Commission said the food was ‘good’. 

For more details, please see Time to come clean about hospital food available for download at www.sustainweb.org/publications/time_to_come_clean 

[4] The results of 2013 Patient Led Assessments of the Care Environment (PLACE) found that half of NHS hospital Trusts in England stated that they were fully compliant with  Government Buying Standards, yet our Freedom of Information survey shows that eleven out thirty of the Trusts which stated that this was the case are not meeting Government Buying Standard criteria for fairly traded tea and coffee, and are therefore not compliant in practice (see Campaign for Better Hospital Food, ‘Government accused of using figures which exaggerate the quality of hospital food’, https://www.sustainweb.org/news/dec13_hospital_exaggeration/). 

[5] Department of Health hospital food announcement, August 2014, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-rules-to-serve-up-better-food-for-nhs-patients-and-staff 
 
[6] Care Quality Commission inpatient surveys show that patient satisfaction with their hospital meals is generally higher where food has been freshly cooked in a hospital’s own kitchen or Central Production Unit (CPU) (large, usually off-site, kitchen production centres) than with pre-prepared meals made by private contractors that are delivered to the hospital to be reheated there (see Care Quality Commission 2013 inpatient surveys http://www.cqc.org.uk/public/reports-surveys-and-reviews/surveys/inpatient-survey-2013) 

[7] Trusts may be able to make short-term savings by contracting out catering to a private company and closing its kitchens, for example by making redundancies to NHS catering staff directly employed by the Trust. However, some are hospitals are showing that it might cost more to buy food from private contractors than to have it made in–house, and therefore may lead to higher catering costs in the long term.

Nottingham City Hospital saved an estimated £6 million by going back to freshly preparing and cooking food on-site after a period of contracted-out catering. John Hughes, Catering Manager at the trust, informally estimates that the NHS could make annual savings of £400million if every hospital did likewise (see Farmers Guardian, Locally sourced food saves hospital £6M per year, 19 May 2010 http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/latest-news/locally-sourced-food-saves-hospital-%C2%A36m-per-year/32039.article).

[8] The data used to inform our Making more of the money we spend on hospital food briefing was collected from a variety of sources including from our own Freedom of Information (FOI) survey of every Trust in England, interviews with hospital catering and facilities managers, and from the Care Quality Commission and the Health and Social Care Information Centre. Based on the findings of our Freedom of Information survey, we estimate that less than half (43%) of all money spent by hospitals on meat, milk, fruit and vegetables, fish and tea and coffee meets the government’s required criteria for hospital food, notably for British standards of production, sustainable fish and fairly traded tea and coffee. 

For more details, please see Making more of the money we spend on hospital food available for download at www.sustainweb.org/publications/better_spending_on_hospital_food 

[9] YouGov, NHS still needs to improve on hospital food, https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/01/23/nhs-still-needs-improve-hospital-food