Five months on an NHS hospital ward could have left me malnourished

The news that health secretary Matt Hancock has ordered a “root and branch” review of hospital food obviously cannot come soon enough after the deaths of five people following a listeria outbreak.

When I first heard that the deaths were being linked to listeria in pre-packaged sandwiches, my first thought was that I understood why the patients had opted for a sandwich. I spent five months in hospital last year, and sandwiches were often the only edible item on the menu.

While hygiene is obviously a huge issue in hospitals, it’s not the only thing we need to worry about. A recent poll found that even NHS staff don’t want to eat hospital food, and more research shows that patients’ comments range from “pigswill” to “not fit for dogs”. Meals being served with no attention paid to how they taste or their nutritional value does nothing to help patients or staff.

My stint in hospital was because of meningitis – I spent two months in a general hospital that was home to 500 patients and over 3,000 staff, and then three months in a neurological rehab hospital with just 20 beds. The quality of the food ranged from mediocre to appalling. As the Soil Association’s Food for Life hospital programme states, “good food is the cornerstone for good health”, and it has the admirable goal for hospital food to be appetising, nutritious and sustainable, but only one in five hospitals are currently achieving this.

I was initially on a soft diet, and the bland, luke-warm mush I was given every meal time was understandable. I had previously been tube fed, couldn’t swallow properly and they just needed to get something into me that I wouldn’t choke on. But even when the soft food diet was lifted, the tepid mush kept on coming. Cold soup. Cold porridge. Watery mashed potato. Water-logged carrots. Flaccid pasta. It may well have been nutritious on paper – a balance of protein, carbohydrate and fat, with a good mix of vegetables – but everything tasted the same. It was barely room temperature by the time it arrived at my bed and it was hard to believe there was a solitary vitamin left standing after every vegetable seemed to have been boiled for 45 minutes.

I had access to my phone and could text my friends, who brought me in crunchy apples and cheese with crackers. My mum brought in packed lunches in every day, making sure I had plenty of fresh salads, wholemeal bread and healthy snacks. But for the elderly patients who didn’t have many visitors, or really much of an appetite when faced with another plate of gloop, things were much bleaker. The only additional food they could rely on was the snack trolley that would turn up sporadically, selling an artery-clogging mix of crisps and sweets. It’s not surprising that a third of over 65s in hospital are at risk of malnutrition.

My move to a smaller, specialised hospital just made things worse. Staff told me they had lost any catering facilities to budget cuts, so everything was ordered in from outside suppliers. All they had to provide meals to 20 inpatients was a small kitchenette, a toaster and a microwave, the latter was used to nuke the meals that arrived frozen. Day after day I was offered rock-hard jacket potatoes, slabs of quiche that you could build a wall with or a selection of ready meals all the same shade of brown. These were occasionally accompanied by some lettuce or a spoonful of coleslaw.

I love the NHS. They saved my life and then taught me how to walk again. So perhaps you’ll think I am being demanding, that wanting to be provided with tasty and nutritious meals on top of the medical care is expecting too much. But I don’t think the positive effects of a good diet while in hospital can be overlooked, not just for nutrition but also for mental health. When you’re languishing in hospital and the only thing to look forward to every day, the only thing that breaks up the boredom, is your meal times, then having something that doesn’t make you wish you were still being tube fed can only be a good thing.