Where’s the beef, Mum?
A brilliant deduction from a Cornish hospital – they have discovered that patients fed on high quality food recover faster. Would you ever?
The radical innovation will be backed up by an as yet unpublished Department of Health research into how healthy food on hospital wards can speed recovery. I shall watch with interest to see how much this rediscovery of the wheel has cost in consultancy and due diligence fees.
Even before this stunning statemnt has been backed up by said lengthy and turgid document showing your grandmother how to suck eggs, little Ben Bradshaw has jumped on the bandwaggon and seen another opening for a totalitarian knee jerk and decided that NHS trusts that don’t follow in the footsteps of this revolutionary discovery will have their budget cut.
Last month we had the Healthcare Commission finding that elderly patients were effectively being left to starve by negligent trusts – those that didn’t have the misfortune to find themselves on the Liverpool Pathway that is. Gwent Healthcare Trust was fined almsot £15,000 for having food cunningly hid about its kitchens that was over a year past its sell by date.
Possible indications that NHS Trusts are finding it hard to pay for both their expensive management consultants and basic good food for their patients? Little Ben hasn’t taken the hint and put a ceiling on the amount squandered on bureaucracy, nope, he’s going to fine hospitals that don’t meet his standards on food quality, which should ensure that the food gets even worse!
The Health and Social Care Bill already before parliament will change the name of the Healthcare Commission and the Commission for Social Care Inspection to…….drumroll and thunderous applause for the image consultants who, no doubt for another few million baubles, came up with this one……..the Care Quality Commission. Short pause to allow everyone to get their letterheads reprinted, new brochures, new charter, and repaint the front entrance in the new corporate colours…….
Right, are we all sitting in our new desks, had our counselling from the change consultants, been on our team building courses? Good, then down to work.
Ben wants you to ensure that Hospital and care home staff “must be able to spot people at risk of malnutrition, provide adequate nutrition that meets their cultural or religious requirements, and ensure that they do not suffer from malnutrition or dehydration” (those of you who are not on the Liverpool Pathway project).
Does it really require an Act of Parliament these days to ensure that a nurse can tell when a patient she hasn’t fed for days is starving? If you say so Ben.
Little wonder that the patients are becoming ever more abusive. Nu-Labour has that covered too. Health Minister Edwina Hart has a cunning new piece of ‘naughty step’ legislation for you too. In North Wales you are to be banned from getting your pint of ‘Guinness is good for you’ from any pub within Gwynedd and Anglesea. Serves you right for complaining!
Do you remember when they used to serve Guinness to you in hospital – with a smile too?
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September 14, 2009 at 18:05 -
“Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food” said Hippocrates.
People scoff when I say that vitamins make people better and yet if it were some pill from the big pharma they would swallow it without a thought…
The world has gone mad I tell you Mad Stark staring bonkers
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September 14, 2009 at 18:22 -
As well as nutrition there is hydration, and in hospitals now it is almost impossible for patients not on a drip to have anything like the liquids necessary, Guiness or no Guiness. Patients are often packed off home, not just hungry and badly short of protein, but in a state of severe dehydration.
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September 14, 2009 at 19:25 -
Yet another good post, Anna!
Purely as an ‘aside’ – not that I could cope with it at my age, but where can I get a ‘Nursing Care Plan’ with legs like that – and the stockings and suspenders??!!
Oh, and the cost of all this ‘renaming’??????? And who asked ‘us’ whether we actually wanted to spend this money???????
By the way, Ben Bradshaw would jump on anything for a ‘totalitarian knee jerk’ – especially if it had male connotations!
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September 14, 2009 at 20:14
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September 14, 2009 at 19:34 -
I like the naughty nurse picture! One of the things that attracts me to your blog, in addition to the quality and thoughtfulness of the writing, is the image that you come up with to head each post.
I suppose now that the government has finally twigged that the breaks have to be put on spending we will have more cost-free announcements from the them to make it look as if they are on our side – Bradshaw speaks up for starving patients, Mandelson slags off ex-Directors of Rover MG, Brown apologises to Alan Turing for being gay – none of it costs a penny but it fills column inches.
It was entertaining in a freakshow sort of way to watch Peter Mandelson on the political catwalk today modelling Emperor Gordon’s New Pink Y-Fronts (though they looked like the same old bollocks to me). Having given up on “Tory cuts versus Labour investment” for fear that Britain might capsize if the entire population rolled their eyes at the same time, they now want us to believe that their cuts will be nice, gentle cuts akin to the delicate snips of a hairdresser trimming a raccoon’s whiskers, whereas Tory cuts will be as heartless as a fishwife gutting a ton of cod. Personally I don’t buy it, and I think it will take a better used-pants salesman than even Mandelson to sell it.
I’m an ignoramus about the NHS but if Ben Bradshaw wants to improve the treatment and nutrition of patients then why not bring back matrons to act as shop stewards for the poor dabs?
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September 14, 2009 at 20:15
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September 14, 2009 at 19:51 -
You could feed the whole hospital on a decent roast dinner if you sacked a few managers, The food budget is about 80pence a meal
Less than the schools.
And then they have the gall to say that people are not fed well in hospitals…
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September 15, 2009 at 00:42 -
my local hospital is appalling……..they are still treating people for miasma!
my friend had pneumonia in march.he was mis-diagnosed for a week.
he had to have 2 blood transfusions and they gave him internal bleeding!my mums neighbour went in to have his knee-caps replaced.
he died.he was 55!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -
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September 15, 2009 at 10:32 -
Are these people proud of themselves for finally figuring this out? I mean, how much pride can you take in working out that healthy food is better for you?
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September 15, 2009 at 10:35 -
@ Demetrius, whatever happened to monitoring fluid intake/output? Back when I was treading the wards it was matron’s favourite subject – make sure each patient has enough to drink and whereever possible necessary note how much fluid has been taken in and how much wee has come out the other end and record it on the patient’s chart. And woe betide the young nurse who didn’t.
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September 15, 2009 at 11:22 -
“Last month we had the Healthcare Commission finding that elderly patients were effectively being left to starve by negligent trusts”
If the State muscles in on family life it must do a proper job or bugger off. We would shame people who left their relatives to starve yet give the State far more leeway. It is evil. It is lazy. It is cheap and we must never forget that. Get the idle ones in hospital offices to sit with elderly patients at meal times.
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September 15, 2009 at 11:34
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September 15, 2009 at 11:57 -
What IS the point of educating nurses to Degree level?
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September 16, 2009 at 10:34 -
Elvera, you hit the nail on the head. Nursing training today is more academic than practical. So much so, that most nurses seem to believe that tending the sick patient’s basic needs (emptying bed pans, ensuring sufficient fluid intake, fluffing pillows, rubdowns to prevent bedsores, etc.) are beneath them.
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September 18, 2009 at 15:27 -
Reading of your Blog should be compulsory for all!!
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