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Good food challenge launched

The skills and imagination of hospital catering teams across Scotland are to be tested in a new competition to develop the best Scottish-themed patient meals.

Recognising the hard work and dedication of catering staff across NHS Scotland, judges will be looking for healthy meals, using fresh local ingredients, which can be made and delivered in hospitals.

Local health boards are being invited to put forward teams that will take part in regional heats over the summer, before a grand final in the autumn.

Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing, Alex Neil said:

“Scotland is known as a land of food and drink with some of the best natural produce in the world. Despite this Scotland still has one of the poorest diet-related health records in the developed world.

“Whatever the reasons for our dietary habits, the Scottish Government is determined that our culture must change if we are to prosper as a nation.

“That is why we are taking a range of steps to help people make better food choices, taking account of food's healthiness, quality, seasonality and freshness.

“As part of this work I want all patients to receive tasty, nutritious food when they are in hospital.

“We have already made huge progress in our NHS, with our nutritional database helping health boards to analyse recipes and ensure meals are nutritionally balanced and match patients’ individual needs.

“The NHS Good Food Challenge 2014 is an excellent opportunity for our committed catering teams to show what they can deliver and to come up with new recipes that are tasty, healthy and can be shared across the NHS.”

Ian Crichton, Chief Executive of NHS National Services Scotland said:

“We work closely with NHS Boards across many fields, to support them to perform more efficiently and improve standards for patients.

“We work with NHS Boards to check their performance against the Nutritional Standards, auditing them every six months. If any issues show up, we send our catering team to the hospital to help them make the required changes to help them improve.

“We have also rolled out a Nutrition Database to enable individual NHS Boards to record data and information, and produce reports on their patient catering recipes. This will ensure that the food they offer is nutritionally balanced and healthy, that recipes can be shared across Scotland and special requirements, such as textured food, or energy dense meals, can be handled.”

As hospital food is cooked on a large scale, teams will be expected to produce up to 50 of their dishes at the same time. The winning menu will be reproduced across NHSScotland.

Background

In 2008 the National Catering and Nutrition Specification for Food and Fluid Provision in Hospitals in Scotland, making Scotland the first part of the UK to produce such a document.

Since 2008, the Scottish Government has committed over £1.75 million to support and improve nutritional care. This includes malnutrition screening of all patients when they are admitted to hospital, the introduction of nutrition champions in every NHS Board and protected mealtimes.

Scotland was the first country in the UK to develop clinical standards for food fluid and nutritional care in hospitals and to make screening for malnutrition a mandatory requirement.