Healthy eating on the menu

A groundbreaking new initiative to improve hospital food for staff has been launched across Cheshire & Merseyside to help tackle poor diet and encourage good health amongst NHS employees. The project is already being piloted across ten hospital trusts throughout the region, with the potential to positively impact upon the health of more than 30,000 staff.
    
Leading the way
As one of the largest employers in the UK, I think the NHS should really be leading the way in terms of promoting healthy eating and healthy living among its employees. Any discussion about the quality of offering in hospital usually focuses upon treatment, and rightly so, which is why there has already been a significant focus placed on how improving patient food can affect clinical outcomes. However, the importance of a healthy diet for a healthy workforce is often a sadly overlooked part of the equation when it comes to delivering the highest possible standard of patient care.
 
Accessing a balanced diet
Whilst the majority of patients are only in hospital for short periods, staff can typically work there for years. Often they will work shifts and many will be in lower income jobs, so their diet can be heavily dependent upon the food that is made available to them within hospital premises. I think that most people do understand what a balanced diet looks like, but the real issues are how accessible are healthy eating options made? And how affordable are the prices? That’s why we’ve focused on making it easier for people to choose a healthy diet.
    
When you consider some of the national health challenges we face, it really highlights that we could be doing more. Cardovascular disease (CVD) is responsible for a huge number of premature deaths each year in the UK, and in the North West these rates are about 25 per cent higher than in most other parts of the country.

Preventative measures
We also know that simply improving a diet is one of the best ways to help prevent it. So when you consider that 80-90 per cent of CVD and up to 40 per cent of cancers are preventable, there’s a real challenge for the public sector to be practising what we preach. We have an opportunity to really influence people’s diet positively, but if we’re really honest about it, we haven’t always been very good at this in the past.
    
Working with hospital Trusts in Cheshire and Merseyside, we quickly became aware of the need to help staff make healthier choices. The project came about as a response to in-depth research around current food provision for staff and food policies and practices, as well as consultation with over 1,700 hospital staff spanning six different hospitals in the area. Key findings revealed fairly poor dietary habits among hospital staff.
    
For example, in one Liverpool hospital, the most popular and widely purchased hot meal was identified as ‘chips and gravy’. The top snacks purchased by staff during their working day were crisps (50 per cent) and chocolate (25 per cent) – whereas fruit was the preferred choice for just 12 per cent.
    
Common misunderstandings were also found with regard to the use of the term ‘healthy eating option’. 37 per cent of staff said that they avoided healthy eating options because they were ‘not on a diet’. Issues such as availability, range of choice and the cost of healthier options were also cited as important barriers to people eating more healthily.

Changing lifestyle
Hospitals haven’t historically had the best reputation for good catering, and even where efforts to introduce improvements to canteen food have been made, there remains a major challenge in actually encouraging staff to change their diets and take up new healthy food options. The reality is that getting people to change their lifestyle doesn’t just happen overnight. Look at how difficult it’s been to change food provision in our schools, and I’d argue that the challenge is even greater amongst adults.
    
Often hospital catering staff simply won’t have the expertise to be able to market their healthy food products effectively, so as well as providing practical training workshops on improving nutrition for hospital catering staff, a key focus has also been delivering social marketing training for each Hospital Trust. This has included the tools for catering staff to run a three month campaign to help promote the availability and health benefits of new healthy food options to hospital staff, under the new umbrella ‘Nourish’ brand.

Pilot initiatives
For a period of time last year, each participating hospital piloted, monitored and evaluated the effectiveness of a wide range of new healthy eating promotions, including canteen menu overhauls, free bottles of water with a main meal, and numerous health food discounts. Canteen staff also modified existing recipes to reduce the amount of fat, salt and sugar and increase fruit and vegetables in meals.
    
The picture here in the North West is fairly typical of hospital food provision for staff nationwide, but as far as we’re aware, this project is completely unique. No one else is looking at supporting hospital employees in this way, so over the coming months, we will be working alongside the University of Liverpool to evaluate and share examples of good practice between the trusts, as well as making them more widely available.
    
Ultimately, I believe that there is a real opportunity here for the NHS to positively impact upon the health of its own staff, and I would encourage every trust to consider these issues.

For more information
For more information about the Cheshire & Merseyside Hospital Food Project, please contact Modi Mwatsama or Florence Sebura on: 0151 928 7820 or visit www.heartofmersey.org.uk