"Dirty" hospital hits back at newspaper allegations
A hospital accused of serving cold, inedible meals and flouting health and safety rules has hit back following a report in a Sunday newspaper.
A reporter from the Sunday Mirror went undercover as a kitchen porter at the Newham General Hospital in east London and came away with a catalogue of poor service, poor food, and poor cleanliness.
The report includes a note, supposedly from an elderly female patient, scribbled on a breakfast order form which reads "Please can I have bacon, sausage, eggs, beans and toast? Been in here for eight weeks and I am very hungry."
The Newham Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, responded today with a vehement denial saying the catering staff are "deeply upset by these false allegations."
Chief executive Kathy Watkins said: "I am unhappy that their professionalism and patient confidence in our services could be undermined in any way by such spurious, underhand and inaccurate reporting."
Here are some of the details of the Sunday Mirror's accusations and Watkins' denials:
| #### What the *Sunday Mirror* says… | #### What the NHS Trust says… |
| - ##### "Food was prepared in dirty kitchens where equipment is caked in grease and filth and hadn't been cleaned for a year." | - ##### "The catering department was given a clean bill of health at the last environmental health inspection just two months ago. Deep cleaning…is carried out by an external contractor every three months and was last carried out three weeks ago. It is quite false to claim that it had not been done for a year." |
| - ##### "Another dinner lady said: ‘Once someone opened a big plastic bag full of bread rolls and a mouse just shot out and ran away in to the kitchen'." | - ##### "The incident…happened 18 months ago and it was clear on investigation that the mouse had come in with the bread delivery. As a result of this incident the Trust changed its bread supplier that day. It is standard procedure to have mousetraps in all large catering departments and a pest control contractor comes in once a week to check the traps. We do not have a mice problem in the kitchens at Newham General Hospital." |
| - ##### "There is a colour code for cutlery and mops and buckets depending on which area of the kitchen is being used for meat, fish, vegetable etc. But the supervisor tells me to ignore this because there isn't enough of each colour to go round." | - ##### "The catering department has a hazard analysis policy which stipulates how food is to be prepared in individual areas. The Environmental Health inspectors have praised this document. There are colour-coded systems and these are strictly adhered to." |
| - ##### "Meals are served from battered and broken trolleys which means they are often cold by the time they reach the ward." | - ##### "The Trust has a programme to replace serving trolleys. This is being undertaken in phases, as it is also part of the NHS Plan's innovative project to provide ward housekeepers…All trolleys are cleaned three times a day after breakfast, lunch and tea." |
| - ##### "At Newham the budget amounts to just £2 per patient per day, and much of the food is so poor that it is left uneaten and thrown away.." | - ##### "The Trust was one of the first to introduce, ahead of schedule, some of the meals from the new NHS menu and last year introduced a ‘Tasty Food Group', which includes patient representatives." |
| - ##### "Although I applied for a job directly at the hospital, managers told me they can only take on porters through an external agency which charges £7.49 while paying staff around £5 an hour." | - ##### "The Trust finds it hard to recruit catering staff and is about to embark on a targetted recruitment campaign. Mr Johnson \[the reporter\] applied for a vacancy and as interviews were not taking place for some time he was advised to try to obtain catering work, not necessarily at Newham Healthcare, through an agency. The agency has been informed of this incident." |
