Dr David McCoy
The Grayston Centre
28 Charles Square
London
N1 6HT
Monday 20th June 2016
Sir David Dalton
Chief Executive
Salford Royal Hospital NHS Trust
3rd Floor, Mayo Building
Stott Lane
Salford
M6 8HD
Dear Sir David Dalton
Many thanks for your response to the letter that we sent to you on the 5th April, regarding our concerns about the decision taken by Salford Royal Hospital to outsource your patient catering.
We would like to take this opportunity to respond, and draw attention again to points we previously raised that were unanswered.
Sharing of documents
We remain concerned that the process to outsource patient catering was undertaken without full transparency or adequate public consultation. In our original letter we requested that you make the following documents available:
a)A full report on the evaluation of the four catering options
b)A list of the public consultation events and activities that were conducted prior to the decision to close the hospital kitchens
c)The tender document itself and details of the criteria that will be used to choose between alternative bids
You responded to say that you were unable to provide us with these documents because that may prejudice the outcome of the tender. Whilst we understand that this may be the case with the tender document itself, we see no reason why the hospital should deny access to the first two documents requested above.
Quality and cost of patient food
We are also concerned that a narrow focus on financial targets and inadequate measures of food quality has been used to justify the decision without considering wider social, economic or environmental impacts.
As you state in your letter,patient experienceof food quality is evaluated through PLACE assessments which is not an objective tool for directly comparing the quality of food between hospitals, because they can be influenced by a number of other factors.
While there are challenges entailed in providing healthy, nutritious and freshly prepared food in a hospital, and while we acknowledge that this cannot be done on the cheap and may not be as cheap as mass produced chilled / frozen meals, our argument is that that this is a false economy when it comes to overall social, ecological and economic impact.
As you have stated, you will already be investing £1.3 million to renovate the kitchen in order to re-heat meals. We argue that the additional cost of £1.2 million to build a fully refurbished kitchen would be marginal over time, especially when taking into consideration the wider benefits to the local community and beyond.
Hospital kitchens can and should be an asset to the local community, as demonstrated by examples such as Nottingham University Hospital. They invest £2 million a year in local business, with 77% of their expenditure on raw ingredients spent locally. Subsequently every £1 spent on catering is said to provide £3 social value in return, largely due to generating new contracts and jobs for local food producers. Such changes can happen without significantly raising the cost of hospital meals.
Jobs
Your statement that this change will not result in any loss of jobs in the hospital does not seem correct. It may be that none of the existing kitchen staff are losing their jobs, but this is because some of them are being redeployed elsewhere. But the fact is there are job losses being incurred across the kitchens and catering department. Furthermore, there will be a loss in ‘skilled’ jobs relative to less skilled jobs. It is hard to argue that this decision can have anything but a negative economic impact on a generally deprived local community that is short of access to skilled jobs.
We are disappointed that the Salford Royal Hospital has made the decision to close its hospital kitchen and outsource its patient catering. While we are only too aware of the acute financial crisis facing many individual hospital trusts, we feel that the decision taken in shortsighted and has lost sight of the fact that a hospital should be more than just a place to treat patients at the lowest cost. Hospitals should be seen as social and economic place-based assets for local communities
This is part of a bigger fight across the NHS, and for this reason, we feel it important to continue the discussion.
For that reason we would like to further discuss these changes in more detail and meet the management team who have evaluated and will be implementing the new service.
Yours sincerely
Dr David McCoy Ms Kath Dalmeny Miss Katherine Button
Director, Medact Coordinator, Sustain Project Officer, Campaign for Better Hospital Food