I spent a month as an inpatient 4 years ago, and overall the food was great (well, for a hospital). It was fresh, properly cooked, and looked and tasted good. My problem was I was on a low sodium diet due to heart failure, and the hospital kitchen didn’t seem to understand that some dishes are simply inedible when they’re not salted. Beef stew & rice, great. Pasta & tomato sauce, no problem. There are other spices in there to add flavor. And then once a week they’d serve chicken noodle soup, with no sodium of any kind in it.
The other half are dead
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When my husband was in the hospital for open-heart to repair a genetically-linked aortic aneurysm, they were totally fine with me bringing in food from home for him. He’s vegetarian and a picky eater (no condiments, except hot sauce and salsa, LOL, among other things) and I cook a LOT of Indian food at home since it’s the best vegetarian cuisine out there.
They even stuck it in the nurse’s fridge for him with his name and all on it. All he had to do was ask for it, and they nuked it up for him. Much better than the jello and mashed potatoes he was eating.
I’d bet that you could change the food, and have a quite measurable effect on outcomes. All that I have seen has been crap.
My father-in-law had cancer of the esophagus and had a stent inserted because the cancer had closed it and he couldn’t eat. (A stent is a sort of wire tube that can hold open the food-hole to the stomach) What do you imagine you might feed someone who has a stent in their esophagus? Not breads and other sticky foods. That’s what the doctor told us. So imagine our surprise when the first post surgery meal offered was a white bread, ham sandwich. Never mind that deli meats are known to contain cancer causing sulfites - white bread sticks to stents. Who knew? Oh, right, that Doctor - he knew. Okay, so now you have a post-op sick man who can now eat for the first time in days, who can’t eat because there’s a bread brick stuck in his throat. Hmm, how to fix that? Coke apparently. The bubbles helped clear it all out, but seriously, coke.
It was a difficult process to watch and not being able to provide honest, healthy food doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their ability to heal.
Several years back, I had to have surgery for a badly shattered wrist. I was freezing cold as I came out of the anesthetic, and it apparently was around dinner time, so I was getting a meal too. One of the nurses took pity on me and must have gone into her own stash, because I begged for some hot chocolate, and by god, got it.
At a hospital in a nearby Saint John NB, using the standard “Uh, it’s to save money” reasoning, the hospital administration decided that if was perfectly, ahem, reasonable to:
- Toast bread in a factory kitchen in Toronto;
- Freeze the toast;
- Ship the frozen toast to Saint John by truck (that’s 1,460 kms);
- Microwave them for the patients.
Were they trying to punish people for using the medical system?
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The last time I was hospitalized, I went into ER at 11am and wasn’t admitted until 10pm - they didn’t feed me while I was in the ER, and food service was over by the time I was admitted. I begged a nurse for some food and was given a tiny microwaved dinner that was so bland I had to force myself to eat all of it, knowing my hideous migraine wouldn’t get any better by starvation.
In other words, the food was terrible and there wasn’t enough of it.
Well that’s ridiculous. There are a lot of things about school that kids are “just not interested in.”
the cafeterias were losing money
It’s a school, not a goddamned market!
My best hospital food experience is- when I went into the ER with meningitis symptoms, they would not even give me a sip of water until they had a tentative diagnosis. Even with my mother on the board of this hospital, procedure won’t allow anything by mouth before diagnosis in case surgery was necessary. When they finally decided I had meningitis and not an aneurysm or something, I got an orange Popsicle. And to this day, I maintain- that orange popsicle was the most delicious thing I have ever eaten in my entire life.
At the end of that hospitalization, I had to eat something and ordered what I thought would be a simple breakfast of a toasted bagel and a glass of cranberry juice. What I received was absolutely shoddy in quality, but I had to shovel it in to get discharged.
A few years later my Gram had a stroke and after a few months of ups and downs my Mum had enough and decided to go on a previously planned vacation, so I took over daily visits for a while. It was really depressing- I went after work, to feed her dinner, and the ‘food’ they give stroke patients is absolutely horrible. We would order dinner, and wait, and then she wouldn’t want to eat any of it- understandably- and then we’d order again. She came through it all, though she lost 40 lbs- but in that situation I’d probably also only take protein shakes and iced coffee. (She’s rallied amazingly, and now in an assisted living apartment, though they have rootbeer floats and stuff and thus she has regained the weight and then some… haha.)
Several years ago, I had surgery at a small hospital that just did surgery. There was a Luby’s cafeteria across the street. Rather than mess with having food services for such a small hospital, they just brought us a menu from Luby’s. Luby’s isn’t exactly great food, but it was without a doubt the best “hospital” food I’ve ever had.
I know the motivations are different but this seems like an opportunity to me. Anyone remember when all airport food service was run by the airport itself? That was horrible and people used to complain all the time. Now most airports have reasonably ok food and I’m sure they’re making way more money as well.
As someone who has worked in hospital food service in the US, I’m really getting a kick out of these replies.
Food service jobs suck anyway, hospital food service sucks ten times more, which is why it tends to pay better. Not nearly enough, but better.
Aside from dealing with other employees (really nurses more than anyone else) who throw a tantrum every time you do your job and give them an answer they don’t want to hear, patients are invariably in a bad mood to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, it comes with the territory and if anyone has a good reason to be unhappy, it’s someone in the hospital. I always did my best to try and help patients. But your day consists of constantly being worn down by everyone around you, and the department is invariably embattled. Here’s two really dirty secrets about food:
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There is no such thing as “healthy” food. Not in a universal sense. What’s healthy for one person is something someone else really shouldn’t be eating. This one got to me every time. “Just get her/him something healthy, like fruit.” Excuse me, but the patient is on a carbohydrate restricted diet ordered by the physician, and they’ve already called for what amounts to 17 carb exchanges (I am prohibited by law and hospital policy from contraindicating these orders).
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You can’t please everyone to save your life. You can have people sample seventeen different versions of the same product and the evaluations will be all over the board. It’s absolutely hopeless. In certain regions, people simply aren’t going to eat anything they don’t recognize. I’ve had patients tell me that our food was way too fancy for them, referring to our lasagna, which is good, but nowhere near great.
These two things mean that it’s extremely hard to retain motivated staff. Turnover is high, and the staff that stay do so only because they’ve become inured and unreceptive. It’s a survival mechanism.
But, you want to know what the best part of my day was? Interacting with patients and trying to find some way to make their day a little better- which is why I left. The first thing that gets cut when budgets are slashed are ancillaries, and no one seems to understand that you only get what you pay for. There are laws that require a certain nurse to patient ratio- there are no laws that require you have enough staff to feed patients. The industry standard wait time for a hospital with 200 to 300 bed capacity is 45 minutes to an hour. The reason is that you literally will have one, on a good day two, tray aides (who will also be responsible for preparing some of the food). Sometimes you have one person in charge of a whole ward or unit, both preparing food and delivering it. Meanwhile staff on the units ran us ragged because the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. We’d end up duplicating a lot of work and wasting a ton of food.
God, the waste… it was unholy.
Anyway, just thought I’d give you a little inside baseball.
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When my son was born the hospital told us we would receive a “congratulatory breakfast” for the first morning after the birth. After being woken up at 7 am after a 3:30am birth, I was served a :warm: fried egg and toast… which promptly gave me food poisoning. I spent the first two days of my son’s life unconscious at home feeling like death could take me at any moment while my wife sat alone in a hospital room caring for our first child.
Hospital food… not good.
To be fair some people eat some really bad food at home too. They’ll be used to it.
That sounds horrifying.
White bread ham sandwiches are pretty void of anything for even the healthiest of individuals, giving it to someone in that situation is just mind boggling. Did they not think he might need some nutrition?
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