Hospital slops a symptom of cost-cutting

YOU pretty much know you've lost the argument when a district health board has to employ "patient experience co-ordinators" to test hospital food.

In that extraordinary language only DHBs speak, such people will patrol wards in Otago and Southland before, during and after each meal service in response to complaints about the tucker.

The patient experience they have to co-ordinate is a region-wide upchuck of hospital meals after on-site catering was stopped and outsourced to Compass Group.

A Stop the Slops protest has been ongoing. Health Minister Jonathan Coleman tried the new food in private and said it was fine. The Real Meals campaign disagrees and you have to agree, photos of the food don't look great. It has also been called too watery and too salty.

But hospital food has always had a reputation for being poor. It will never be what we get at home or taste like a takeaway, but the reputation has improved significantly in recent years.

The southern experiment seems to have derailed all that. If anyone can get policy overturned it's spirited southerners. But the meal is just symptomatic. Southern District Health Board says it introduced outsourcing as a cost-cutting measure, as the Government asks for major savings from our DHBs.

One board member was brave enough to vote against the change, emergency department specialist Dr John Chambers, but Compass got its 15-year contract to supply the meals, previously made at the hospitals.

Good food is essential to good health. And the closer it is cooked to those who eat it, the better.

It also doesn't make a lot of sense to take jobs and business away from the regions and give it to Auckland, then talk about initiatives to promote the regions.