FEATURE: Behind the scenes with the hospital catering team

I must admit, it was probably not the most enticing invitation I had ever received.

It would be fair to say that hospital food doesn’t have the best reputation and, after all, no one really chooses to dine in a ward out of choice.

But hospital food in East Sussex has undergone somewhat of a revolution over the last couple of years.

And if you haven’t been an inpatient at your local hospital for a while, then you are in for a surprise.

Gone are the days of bulk cooking, limited choice and a generally pretty inflexible service.

Now a comprehensive seasonal menu boasts more than 32 dishes, hot meals individually cooked to order, with more choices and additional menus for those on special diets.

East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust employs 74 people in its catering team, including chefs, catering assistants, washer-uppers and porters, working across the four hospitals run by the Trust - the Conquest Hospital in Hastings, Eastbourne’s DGH, Bexhill Hospital and the Rye, Winchelsea and District Memorial Hospital.

The catering department in the Conquest is located at the top of the building.

Today I am meeting Michelle Clements, general manager of facilities services, and Linda Griffiths, catering operations manager for Hastings, Eastbourne, Rye and Bexhill, to find out more about how and why the changes came about.

Linda said: “We used to offer only two hot mains, a salad or a sandwich and a limited supper menu.”

Michelle said: “In the past we were criticised for providing limited choice.

“Because it was a bulk service, there was not a lot of flexibility.”

She added: “There was always the stigma of hospital food, so we tried to improve our service by normalising the patients’ experience by offering different dishes and for different stages in their experience.”

In early 2014, the Trust developed a working partnership with a company called Steamplicity, which helped them to design a menu to better reflect the needs of patients.

The company provides the trust with its main meals and introduced the team to a new way of cooking - by steam pressure.

The new scheme was rolled out at the DGH first, with the Conquest following suit a couple of weeks later.

Linda said: “It was completely different to what we did before.

“There are a lot of other companies that do it, but those are frozen offerings whereas this is chilled and allows us to provide fresh vegetables to our patients.”

She added: “There was a lot involved. We did not do it lightly.”

Inpatients are presented with menus at ward level and make their choices from the abundance of hot meals, salads, puddings and light bites on offer.

The choices are sent down to the catering department and the individual meals are selected from the shelves of the hospitals’ streamlined industrial refrigerator.

The meals are loaded into large portable yellow chilled insultated trollies before they are transported up to the correct ward.

The plated meals are unloaded and cooked at ward level in microwave unit, according to the instructions on the packet.

Producing a dish of salmon with hollandaise sauce, Linda says: “It’s got all the ingredients on here and the ward has all this information too.

“It’s got a produced on and use by date and this number is the number you put into the microwave.

“It’s not minutes, it’s a programme on the microwave that we have specifically for this service.”

Michelle added: “Community hospitals (Bexhill and Rye) have a slightly different menu because patients are in there longer.

“They are cooked on site and they have set mealtimes there and they have the choice to go to the dining room to eat.”

Once each meal has been cooked, an electronic thermometer is placed in the centre of the dish, to ensure it has reached the correct temperature.

If it hasn’t, the meal is placed back into the steamer for 30 seconds.

If it still hasn’t reached the required temperature after this second blast, the food is thrown out.

Staff keep strict records when it comes to mealtimes, taking down the temperature of every dish delivered to every patient.

This information is held by the hospitals for six months.

The hospitals’ menu is revised twice a year, following consultation with patients and Healthwatch East Sussex, a local watchdog for health and care services in East Sussex.

The current autumn and winter menu came out in October.