1. Hospital food has always been rather awful, and now they're trying to fix that.
York's hospitals are at the forefront of this movement, providing restaurant-style service and meals that can meet the patients' specific dietary needs and preferences. The food is cooked fresh every day, instead of re-heating pre-packaged portions. The patients are happy with the change.
At Southlake, they are looking to implement Steamplicity (essentially, steaming everything), which should provide more choice and more nutritious meals.
2. That's all well and good, and certainly when my own father was in the hospital, I felt that the food could definitely stand to be better: for one thing, they once accidentally gave him a fatty steak a couple days before his coronary artery bypass surgery. It's always bothered me that this is an issue at all -- hospitals are in the business of making people as well as they can be.
Certainly, the reason for many hospitals is probably a lack of funding. Hospitals are already always short on staff, equipment, and money. With funds going into keeping the place functioning as a hospital, the things that aren't seen as quite as important can often be shoved to the side, and certainly meals seem to have been relegated to the backseat. For the patients, though, it's obviously kind of awkward when a diabetic gets a fully sweetened Jell-O for dessert.
It's understandable, given the hectic pace of a hospital (although triage is used specifically only for the emergency room, it's not unreasonable to think that something similar is in use with prioritizing -- and food is probably not at the top of the list), but it's still kind of troubling. Hopefully the new system will help suss out the problems and deal with them.
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