What’s better: prison food or hospital food?
It all comes down to cost. How much does a hospital allocate to provide three meals a day for each patient? The average is £8.54, yet Newham University Hospital in Plaistow, East London, was spending just £2.19 on breakfast, lunch and dinner. For prison inmates the amount per day is one penny more - £2.20.
Fortunately this low amount is not usual. If you happen to be on the wards in Barts Hospital, you’ll be lucky. They spend £15.65 per patient every day. Now Barts has merged with Newham (and Whipps Cross Hospital) to form an NHS trust so spending should be less of a lottery and hopefully overall standards should improve.
This last week I’ve spent hours of each day visiting someone in hospital. The food was unspeakable. Luckily there’s an M & S nearby so she got daily coffee and croissants from a visiting nephew and small pots of whatever I’d made for dinner when I went in the evenings.
For those who don’t have relatives bringing in goodies, I have another suggestion: if you’re going to get ill, do it in Italy. Apparently the hospital food there is well cooked and it comes with a smile and ‘buon appetito’.
