to think that meals in hospital shouldn't be free?

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It just seems a bit strange. You'd have to pay for it if you were at home. The cost of feeding hospital patients must be astronomical, and the food (in my quite extensive experience) is pretty crappy. Cheap, badly cooked, and in many cases unsuitable for specific dietry requirements.

Wouldn't most people be happy to pay for their meals, and in return expect to be served appealing, healthy food?

Obviously patients in for extended periods or those on benefits should be offered a free/heavily subsidised option.

It would require some investment to completely change the system - but surely it would save millions in the long-run?

What do you think?

I haven't read the whole thread but just wanted to add my own, slightly odd, experience.

I'm in hospital at the moment, on week 3, following 3 weeks in a different hospital.

Like Clemette says, I need a high fat, high calorie diet - around 3500 calories a day. In the first hospital this was easily sorted - the dietitan came to see me, added my name to a special list, and I was able to order additional food, snacks, meals etc.

I assumed the second hospital would have similar. Sadly not. Apparently if I eat everything the hospital provides, I will get 1600 calories a day. Now surely that is too few for anyone, but probably reflects the average patient age - I'm not on a labour ward where perhaps things are different. There is no possibility of extra snacks or meals, so instead I am hAving nearly 2000 calories a day in very expensive (and very unappetising) complete medical supplement drinks, milkshake and puddings, plus whatever my friends are bringing in. It would surely be easier and cheaper just to have more food around, but as I understand it these supplements come from the medication budget, rather than the catering.

This doesn't really add anything to the discussion, other than to highlight once again that it is alright when you can speak up for yourself and hAve friends and family around to help. I do fear for the elderly and alone, and I am surprised that the NHS, of which I cannot speak highly enough, has somehow shifted care so monumentally that it is easier to get a nutritional shake than an extra slice of toast.

Milady- is it the "royal london" you are referring to? That's where I was an Inpatient, bloody dreadful!

I have heard the way to get the nicest food is to request vegetarian halal, then you get a nice lentil & veg dhal & pilau rice with no mystery potentially recovered meat in. If i ever have the misfortune to go back in there, that will be my angle, apparently due to the catchment that's what they order the most of, and I heard it was from a local restaurant that made it. That was a rumour though!

I heard about a story when I worked in older peoples social work, One of my colleagues clients was very poorly and an inpatient. Apparently she would refuse to eat for the nurses, but if her husband helped her behind the curtain, not a crumb left. She died of starvation, her husband had been coming in every meal time and eating all her meals. When the Social worker had questioned him about WTF he thought he was doing?

How could he eat her food for weeks and allowed her to starve and lie to the nurses, he simply said, without a hint of irony or shame that she had always cooked for him, and he didn't know how to cook (!!!!) and she wasn't eating it, so otherwise HE would have starved so he ate it. My colleague just didnt have a clue where to start with that one. WTF.

Eating a patients food in hospital should be a criminal offence I think. Even if it doesn't get to this stage, nurses and dr's will still be confused as to how much has been eaten, in order to plan the nutritional response. If you had asked "AIBU to arrest or issue on the spot fine for someone who eats a patients food in hospital" I would definitely say NO!

love 1 foot x

Oxcat- that dispatches report that was on, identified exactly that the amount of calories provided was too low, and that for people who were losing weight, eg elderly people, it was nowhere near enough to help them repair and maintain weight.

I hope you get better ( and outta there) soon!

Love 1foot

Ps are you being ripped off for that in-the-bed internet. I paid 10er for mine once and it didnt work and I couldnt get a refund!!

1footinfront about the lady's twunt of a husband! That is horrific, poor poor woman. No criminal charges for that utter cruelty I suppose?

As for the hospital, yy. They do like to keep you all hanging around. Dd was sorted by morning one day on the hottest day of the year last year but ds (autistic) kept bounding into isolation rooms during the height of the swine flu thing.

And the lift was out of order so I had to have him crawl up and down five flights of wooden stairs to the ward on his hands several times and then he went mad when I tried to put gel on them.

He did start an awful illness a day later which I am convinced was connected to the experience.

YABVU.

i am reinded of the hospital food at the hospital in plymouth recently. It was vile, everything tasted of plastic. How come some hospitals can get it right? I read an article in one of the leaflets in there about how they had pioneered a new re heating system, but it still tasted really bad. I had to go to the hospital restaurant and the hospital cafe to find edible food for my dd. Cost a fortune.

No way anyone would have paid for that shit, so glad it was free.

kitbit - same in Greece, relatives have to provide all the care (24hrs a day) for patients.
DP Grandmother was recently in hospital after a fall and MIL was there from 7am until 11pm every day. We then had to pay a night nurse (70 Euro a night) to stay from 11pm to 7 am.

The UK is extremely lucky.

i have recently been in hospital in isolation with my daughter who regularly needs long stays in hospital.
she is mostly in due to the fact i can't get her specialist equipment supplied to me at home, even though all doctors and nurses agree she needs it there.

last time we spent 3 weeks in isolation, during that time i wasn't earning a wage and was having to pay for extra childcare for my DD1. I wasn't allowed out of her room very often and so couldn't go to the shops, parent kitchen or cafe for food so it was at the discretion of the nurses if i got fed or not.

they fed me for most meals without me asking but if i had to pay for that or pay in the hospital cafe for my food i simple couldn't afford it. i couldn't leave or have visitors.

you seem to have the benefit of being able to call the food cheap, pretty crappy and badly cooked, to me food is food when your in that situation, caring for a seriously sick little girl all I wanted was something to give me the energy to get through the days and nights. the nurse just brought me what ever was left over.

if i went into hospital myself unwell and was told is a patient i had to pay for food i prob wouldn't eat.

OP your argument seems to be about the cost of food to the taxpayer but while i was there (every hour of every day) i was looking after my child, applying her creams and ointments, giving her physio and preventing her bedsores all of which a nurse would have had to spend all day doing if i couldn't be there so, i think i deserved a bit of food!

I'm on a medically necessary gluten free diet. Every time I have been in hospital they have failed to feed me at all - including telling me that I couldn't go home till I'd eaten but having nothing that I could eat safely. After having DS I had a baby on SCBU, was bfing, and had had a PPH, but was totally reliant on DH to bring me meals otherwise I wouldn't have had anything to eat at all.

The cost of charging for meals would be a lot more than it would bring in, and would cause a lot of difficulties and possible harm to patients though. So much as I think that hospital catering needs bringing up to the same standard as some hospitals already acheive, I don't think it's the extra money they need, just care and attention

3Breasts: hospitals have a real problem with families bringing in their own food - infection control etc (i'm not saying they don't allow it - it happens all the time) i'm just saying they have problems with it. unfortunately not all patients have family members who can come in and help with feeding and sometimes people end up not eating because nurses (hard working and just too pressed for time) just don't have time to do it.

I am a bit surprised to see someone who is in charge in a hospital advocating that patients should pay for their own food and possibly otehr extras, and arguing that the NHS is crap.

I would imagine that someone who has so little faith in the organisation that they work for, and so little interest in the care of their patients (feeding them is pretty fundamental), maybe they would be better off in a different organisation.

I have had loads of contact with the NHS and it has has had its moments, but overall the quality of the treatment (and the food) I have received has been excellent.

Rather than saying that basic services should be removed from patients, how about looking at areas where it does work, and see what they are doing differently.

Let's face it if you're not going to feed people there's no point in bringing them in for treatment. Maybe that's the point.

Does this include people who have feeding tubes and things I wonder.

ie be proactive. Find out which trusts work and provide good food and services, with high patient satisfaction and recovery rates and so on, and ask them how they do it. Then change how it works in your trust.

Rather than starving your patient.s

I actually would have welcomed the opportunity to buy decent food when ds was constantly in hospital.

His main treatment centre was Addenbrookes where I could go to a choice of four or five food outlets (including Burger King ) there was also a supermarket. I could supplement his diet very nicely and also eat reasonably healthily myself.

When we were in the local hospital the food looked and smelt dire so I discovered the canteen which was no better. When we had a visitor I would leave them in charge of ds while I drove to Marks and Spencer to buy provisions for us, I used to park in the Taxi rank right outside the shop and argue like hell with traffic wardens and cab drivers, I got few parking tickets but it wasn't going to stop me providing something that ds would eat.

In the end ds had to have Total parental Nutrition which cost the NHS a lot of money and I do think this could have been avoided if the food was better.

We have Health Insurance which the hospitals should have claimed against or billed me for so that I could claim. It just seems the NHS isn't geared up to handling money at all.

Perhaps the answer should be to provide a meal service for patients but have outside food choices on site for visitors, parents and patients. The hospital would raise huge revenue by having them onsite.

As if any food will have any nutritional value at all once it's been frozen then deep fried!

Perhaps when we build new hospitals each ward should have their own kitchen and canteen. It would still be mass catering but on a slightly smaller scale. We might even be able to introduce unprocessed fish, meat and vegetables. (in my dreams)

Pensioners are already facing being undernourished in hospital, malnutrition being a known problem.

And don't forget that a pensioner who is in hospital for more than 6 weeks has their pension halved, as the state believes they are saving on not paing for food, when we all know that gas/electric/other non-food bills don't go away.

So, how does a pensioner pay even a small charge for food, when food is in fact an essential part of recovery.

The food in our hospital is not frozen and then deep fried.

it is possible to provide excellent, tasty, nutritious, fresh food on teh wards. Our hosptial does it. Therefore it should be possible in all trusts.

Our trust also provides decent food imo.

My first job as a staff nurse was on a very busy medical admissions unit. I always made time to ensure that the patients under my care had enough to eat and drink. Feeding them myself if appropriate.

To charge them for food is unthinkable. They have enough to worry about, especially the elderly on pensions.

I have no quibbles really about the quality of the food -all things considered, I think it is reasonably well balanced, well prepared and hot when served.

My problem is just the quantity. I do see elderly patients starving because they are unable/reluctant to feed themselves and there simply aren't enough staff to go round. However, as the dietitian confirmed, even if you eat all meals provided by the hospital, you will only get 1600 calories a day. This must be calculated based on something, but it does seem to fall horribly short of the recommended 2000/2500, before you start adding the complcations of special diets.

CMOT - you were very unlucky. Gluten-free choices are clearly marked on the menu here. It is, to some degree, slightly random what actually comes up, but you can at least order it!

Alouiseg - I love that foyer at Addenbrookes! Just having somewhere reasonably civilised to go when taken off the ward was such a revelation! When I was there last the choice of food outlets was good, I thought. Surely even fast food has a place in the context of lots of other healthy alternatives, and occasionally I really did crave some fries!

My only experience of hospital food was 8 nights in the postnatal ward at St Thomas's and quite honestly it was frightening. Quite apart from the fact that none of it was recognisable as anything I'd say was food, I had been told under no uncertain terms by the surgeon not to get constipated, so what was on the menu? Junk bread toast, greying eggs, huge plates of soggy 'pasta', stale banana and instant custard .

I didn't eat a single hospital meal during my stay. DH brought supplies in each day. If it wasn't for the sushi place over the road and M&S fruit salads I think I'd have been seriously unwell.

My 92 year old grandmother was in St Peters hospital, Chertsey, for 10 weeks two years ago and it was touch and go whether she would survive the stay. The hospital 'food' was a big part of her failure to recover quickly enough. My mum and aunt kept her alive with food smuggled in from home.

It's a ridiculous state of affairs - there should at least be the option of buying healthy food, which, thankfully at St Thomas's there now is as they have installed an M&S. Still prepackaged, but miles miles better than hospital slop.

I was admitted via gp a few months back and rushed there in a panic crapping myself tbh with no money or anything so if you had to pay i would have starved - as it was though i starved anyway as they kept parking the bloody yummy smelling trolley next to me and not offering me any.

oxcat I imagine the reduced calorie amount is based on the assumption that most patients will not be expending that many calories through exercise.

that's my guess anyway.

There is a M&S food place in the hospital?

That sounds like an excellent reason for the hosp to totally fail to provide decent food to patients in the first place TBH. Am v about that.