Mark Bradley: The unpalatable truth about cheap and nasty hospital food

Whether you “feed” or “starve” a cold (I can never remember which one it is, but opt for the former), nourishment plays a fundamental part in restoring people to rude health, so come the illness, come your Mum, with hot lemon, warming soups and hearty stews.

I’m no medical expert, but you’d imagine our beloved NHS would be fixed to this principle too.

But news reaching me from a friend in hospital only confirms the opposite. At a time when you really need helping, the food’s so bad you won’t ask be asking for a second one.

Mark Sparrow, another unhappy patient, founded www.hospitalfoodfight.net after enduring the despair of hospital food during a recent extended stay.

He quotes the NHS as confirming that more people than ever before are leaving hospital malnourished and, not unreasonably, points out that it is precisely the hospitals themselves that are doing the malnourishing.

This is hardly surprising when you consider that we spend more money on prisoners’ meals than we do on those prepared for NHS hospital patients (according to the hospitalfoodfight website it’s around £2.10 per meal in prison and £1 a meal in hospital).

Having said that, I could appreciate the difficulties in making reduced budgets stretch to cover every priority in a hospital, but what I’m hearing suggests that while the food may be awful it may simply be reflecting a culture of abject customer care.

Take this example. I have a friend who, with the help of some wonderful doctors and nurses, is bravely battling cancer. However, when the doctors leave, his food arrives and his heart sinks.

For two nights, his food has been so badly prepared it has been inedible. He writes: “Last night I refused to eat a burnt black meal (and) tonight I refuse to eat burnt hard rice and bone dry curry. Why does it happen? Because the pre-cooked meals must be re-heated to a temperature of 75 degrees (I’m told). But if that renders them entirely inedible what’s the point!”

He has a point, surely. In our health and safety obsessed, risk-averse dystopian “we know best” style of management, our universal healthcare system is failing to observe even the most basic tenets of the Hippocratic oath (‘I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone’).

I use the word “dystopia” deliberately, since it’s easy to feel like a “number” under this unfeeling regime.

It’s therefore not an issue of economics, but a question of values. To echo a phrase I’ve heard many times from progressive physicians and health leaders, we need a culture where we not only focus on the patient’s health, but more importantly, on their wellbeing too.

Thankfully, there is a movement towards establishing “patient-centred” care and there is heartening news (if you’ll forgive me) from the angina field. Sufferers of this illness (and their families) often describe themselves as feeling disconnected from the decision-making process.

Ironically, the heroic specialists, upon whom patients rely, find it difficult to convey things in simple terms. As Mike Chester, from Liverpool’s National Refractory Angina Centre says: “Even when patients have carefully planned what they want to ask the doctors, they forget or find themselves tongue-tied when it comes to saying it.”

Patient-centred care not only addresses the patient’s health issues, but also their wider “well being”. We want to better understand the issues so that we can be more involved in making decisions.

The team in Merseyside has seen dramatic results emerge from this more informed approach to patient care.

Quality of life is measurably improved, emergency hospital admissions are falling and more and more patients, educated about their condition and confident in its management, are avoiding the need for heart operations.

If hospital food is simply a question of economics, then its improvement – in these austere times – can only be to the detriment of another important area of care.

However, if it is recognised for what it is – an absence of practices aimed at addressing the patient’s wellbeing – then the implications are unthinkable.

We’ll simply lower our expectations to the point that when a future government attacks the financial viability of the NHS, not only will they have a reasonable case for their actions but they will also find their moves met with increasing resignation by a public for whom the hospital food experience becomes another dehumanising aspect of a failing service.

Ultimately, the comparison with prison meals remains compelling. Not simply because they’re better, but also because this all echoes a certain TV series with that memorable cry of despair: I am not a number, I am a free man. The reality is, when it comes to hospital meals, you’ve more in common with the prisoner than you ever imagined.

Mark Bradley is a consumer campaigner from Bradford.