Doctors say only Jamie Oliver can cure NHS food!

May 9 2005

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is being called upon by Junior doctors to repeat his success with school dinners and lead a campaign to improve food in hospitals.

At their annual conference in London, delegates approved a motion calling on the British Medical Association (BMA) to ask him for help.

Dr Eleanor Draeger, a junior doctor from London urged delegates to back her call for reform saying that food and nutrition were absolutely vital for the health of patients.

Junior Doctors Committee chairman Dr Simon Eccles also cautioned that poor hospital food was slowing patients' recoveries.

The call to bring in Oliver comes five years after former Masterchef host Loyd Grossman led an initiative to improve hospital menus but according to Dr Eccles a survey of 100 junior doctors showed none reported seeing any changes in the food served in their hospital. Eccles says that the initiative hasn't seemed to make any difference to the food.

He says the food doctors are served in the evenings is pretty awful, and the food the patients get served is substantially worse. Relatives often bring in food for patients.

Dr Eccles says that in one hospital he worked in, the evening meal would be a sandwich, an apple and orange juice and if it was a beef sandwich, there would be two slices of beef and nothing else; no butter and no salad. He said patients recovering from illness or surgery needed more than the normal daily intake of 2,000 calories. Patients get an average of 1,000 calories a day.

The Department of Health says £500m is spent on hospital food in England each year, with the NHS providing 300 million meals at a cost of 60p per meal and progress on increasing standards was being made. A spokeswoman said the department provides around 300 million meals each year which makes it one of the largest catering operations in the world.

Another department spokesman said progress is being made to improve standards but it was "wrong" to say the Grossman initiative had "failed" to improve standards as hospitals were offering more good food.

The government promised extra funding for school meals after a high profile campaign led by Oliver. A spokesman for the chef said: "We hope that when the School Dinners Campaign establishes itself in the rest of the country, the government will then take a look at how the initiative has had a major impact, as this could easily be duplicated for hospitals."