Changes in hospital food: 1984 vs 2011

A very interesting piece on changes in hospital food at the Sarborough Hospital came out a few days ago on the hospital's blog site. There has been a huge change in the food in recent decades.

The blog indicates that the General site of the Hospital had in 1984:

770 beds
2 complete, fully operational conventional kitchens
a 16 day selective menu (patients made choices from multiple options)
hundreds of complex therapeutic diets
procurement of fresh and local meat/poultry and produce
hundreds of recipes produced in house from scratch by:
15 cooks, 2 bakers, 3 salad and sandwich makers, all skilled, passionate and dedicated!
and a GREAT reputation for food!

Now the General site has:

325 beds
1 complete NOT fully operational conventional kitchen
a 7 day non-selective menu (that’s right, NO choice)
hundreds of complex therapeutic diets
procurement of 80% of all food supplies from a large multi-national food distribution company (not sure where the food is coming from)
approximately 100 recipes produced in house by:
1 full time and 2 part time cooks, 1 full time and 2 part time cold production staff, all skilled, passionate and dedicated!
an AVERAGE reputation for food

These changes are probably pretty typical for a large hospital in Ontario: but they are definitely not for the best.

But thankfully, the hospital leadership "is NOT outsourcing our service to a large uncaring multinational company. Also it is NOT forcing a change from conventional production to cold plating and rethermalization, which happened in many other hospitals."

Even better, the hospital is in the process of trying to cook more food from scratch.

This is an exciting development and I, for one, am looking forward to following developments at this hospital. Hopefully, they will spark a trend to fresh, local food that other hospitals will follow.

Comments

Huge cuts in public sector wages predicted

The Ontario Financial Accountability Office (FAO) says that, with inflation, real wages in the public sector will decline 11.3% over the three year period 2021/2 - 2023/4 . This would radically deepen the trend towards lower wages during the last ten years. The FAO reports that since 2011, the average annual salary for the Ontario public sector employees (defined here as employees of schools, colleges, provincial government, provincial agencies, and hospitals) has increased by $10,385 -- or 1.6 per cent on average annually. This is the lowest increase of all the sectors and lower than inflation, which averaged 1.8 per cent per year. Over the ten years that would be about a 2% pay cut. The FAO reports that wage settlements were the lowest in the provincial public sector over the last decade: Hospital Wages Especially Challenged: The FAO predicts hospital wages will increase even less than in the public sector -- just ...

Too many public sector workers in Ontario?

Opponents of public services often try to portray the public sector as having grown disproportionately. In fact, since 1976, the number of public sector employees has not quite kept pace with the population. In 1976, the number of public sector employees in Ontario as reported by Statistics Canada averaged 830,800. By 2012, the number had increased to 1,330,700 -- a 60.2% increase. That sounds like significant growth -- true. But the population has increased from 8,413,779 in 1976 to 13,505,900 in 2012, a 60.5% increase. In other words, population growth has run slightly ahead of the growth in public sector employment. In 1976, close to 10% of the population worked in the public sector. It stayed pretty much this way until the Mike Harris government came to power when it dipped below 9%. It returned close to the historical range in the last six years or so, declining in 2012 to below the 1976 averag...

Are health care administrative expenses out of control in Ontario?

The Progressive Conservative government has justified its health restructuring plans with the claim that administrative expenses are much higher in Ontario than in Canada. When introducing the reforms, health minister Christine Elliott claimed , “Over the last five years, Ontario has spent 30% more than the Canadian average in administrative expenses on its health care system.” Elliott did not indicate her source of information. Presumably, however, the Progressive Conservatives are referring to the CIHI simplified and user friendly “ Your Health System ” graphs. Those graphs show “administrative expenses” in Ontario at 5.8% in Ontario while it is 4.5% in Canada. This CIHI measure is actually fairly narrowly defined. It is the percentage of “the legal entity’s” total expenses associated with the administrative, finance, human resources and communications functional centres. However “the legal entity” used for this estimate is [1] only...

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog