Hospitals are to be forced to ensure patients receive better quality, healthier food in a crackdown by health secretary Jeremy Hunt.
From now on, hospitals will be required to offer fresh fruit around the clock, or risk being fined or losing vital NHS contracts.
A cutback in salt is also on the agenda, and patients will also be entitled to a choice of food, with Hunt aiming to end the inadequacy of much-lamented hospital food.
The poor quality of hospital food was set out in a detailed report from a standards panel Hunt set up to investigate the problem.
It was chaired by Dianne Jeffrey, chairwoman of Age UK, who told The Guardian: 'Being in hospital is often a very worrying experience, and it can be made even worse when the food is unfamiliar and unappetising and you have no control over what and when you eat and drink.
'While hospitals are not five-star restaurants, it's important that food and drink is tasty, nutritious and thoughtfully presented so that people can eat as well as possible.'
Hunt is introducing five new standards, which he says will be legally-binding on all providers of NHS care, including private operators such as Care UK. They will cover any provider who serves food to patients – including acute and specialist hospitals, but also mental health units and community service providers.
The standards will also stipulate that every patient entering hospital should be screened for malnutrition, and be given a personalised food plan and that any patient who needs help from staff to eat or drink should receive it.
Hospitals that do not implement all the required changes will be in breach of their contracts with the local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) which pay them to treat patients.
In addition, from Friday every hospital in England will be ranked, on the NHS Choices website, for seven different aspects of their approach to food. These aspects include the quality and choice of food, choice of breakfast, availability of fresh fruit and ability to eat between meals.
Despite this widespread reform, Alex Jackson, coordinator of the Campaign for Better Hospital Food, and a former member of Jeffrey's panel, said: “Jeremy Hunt’s announcement that he will introduce 'legally-binding' standards for hospital food appear to fulfil what we have always strived for, yet we’re left feeling that he has pulled the wool over our eyes.
'We want to see hospital food standards set down in legislation, similarly to school food standards, and therefore universally applied to all hospitals and protected by publicly elected representatives for generations to come. But the government still refuses to do this, and has only committed to including the standards in NHS commissioning contracts, which are long documents full of clauses that without proper enforcement and monitoring can be ignored by hospitals.
'The government may have inserted a new clause in a legal document, but that won’t be what most people consider to be legally-binding. It’s woefully inadequate.'
He added: 'We’re also alarmed that the government’s food standards are weak and only reflect basic catering and care standards which are already commonly implemented in the NHS, including that ‘tap water is available’ to patients. Good things in themselves, but nowhere near ambitious enough to have a transformative effect on patient meals.”
