Half of hospitals serve food that fails to meet nutrition standards

Almost half of hospitals are giving patients food that fails to meet health and nutrition standards.

Children are being fed worse food in hospital than at school, it has been found.

Health campaigners say the situation is ‘diabolical’ considering how key nutrition is to aid recovery. The say that more must be done to enforce standards

Only 55 per cent of hospitals in England are ‘fully compliant’ with standards set by the British Dietetic Association, according to a review from the Department of Health. Only 54 per cent were found to be ‘fully compliant’ with the ‘ten key characteristics of good nutritional care’.

These include screening for malnourishment and ensuring that patients have choice and control over what they eat and drink.

Almost one in five patients rate hospital food as ‘poor’, a proportion that has stayed constant for five years. The proportion rating it as ‘fair’ is stuck at less than 30 per cent.

However, there was a slight improvement in numbers of those who like the food with around 60 per cent rating it ‘good’ or ‘very good’, marginally up over the past two years.

The review was to assess whether hospitals are complying with what are supposed to be legally binding food standards put in place after an inquiry in 2014, the Mail reports.

The report’s foreword, signed off by health minister Philip Dunne, says: “We are pleased to see that good headway has been made on adopting the standards, but more importantly, that they have been associated with a measurable improvement in food quality and patient experience.”

But Katherine Button, of the Campaign for Better Hospital Food, told the Mail: “The situation in hospital food standards is diabolical. When the hospital food standards were brought in two years ago, we were promised that these were legally binding. With half of hospitals still not meeting even the basic standards, we can now see that this is demonstrably not the case.

“This means sick children in hospital wards are not getting the same quality of food that they are legally required to be fed at school when they are well.

“Enough is enough – we need equal legal protections for hospital food, like the protections that exist for food in schools and prisons.”

Katharine Jenner, of Consensus Action On Salt And Health, said: “This is yet more evidence that voluntary measures don’t work, even when they’re dressed up as ‘legally binding’ in NHS standard contracts for hospitals.

“We need mandatory standards with rigorous monitoring, reporting and meaningful sanctions for non-compliance.”

Past studies have suggested that food served to hospital patients is so sub-standard that some suffer from thirst and malnutrition.