Group items tagged

She says she had greater success at Ryerson University, where she was hired to overhaul the food service from 2013 to 2015. “Ryerson was tremendous. We created a beautiful model and the students responded to it,” she says.Under her direction, staff stopped reheating soup from a bag and learned to cook from scratch with raw ingredients. “Soup easily became one of the most popular things on the campus,” she says. “Because it was good and made with thoughtfulness and not that much more work.”The big take-away for Maharaj was learning to negotiate with the companies that provide the food. “Working with a third-party operator is the undeniable piece you have to address when you’re talking about institutional food,” she says. “And these operators are the people we need to start talking to when we want change.”

“The vegetables are almost non-existent. They’ll throw a couple on the plate. You’ll have a spoonful of some nasty peas. And they’re not even green no more. They’re grey,” says Tom, who also says powdered mashed potatoes are served multiple times a week (“Both dehydrated and fresh potatoes are used in both the cook-chill and institutional kitchens,” Ross says.)Tom avoided eating chicken entirely when he was in jail. Another woman I spoke with, who spent a year at Vanier from 2010 to 2011, says the poultry was routinely served undercooked and pink. She says she relied on food purchased at the canteen, mostly ramen noodles. When dinner was “fish slop” – a dish she describes as “garbage with fish parts in it” – inmates would run to their stashes, softening the noodles with hot water from the sink over the toilet.

In 2012, Paulette Padanyi, a now-retired faculty member of the University of Guelph, co-wrote a research paper called Food Provision in Ontario Hospitals and Long Term Care Facilities. Of the 55 hospitals studied, 19 hospital administrators agreed to discuss their food budgets. All of them outsourced the food production. Most told Padanyi that they took their cue from long-term-care facilities, which have a prescribed Ministry of Health and Long Term Care rate of $8.03 per day per patient to spend on food.In 2012, the average amount spent per patient in the hospitals Padanyi looked at was $7.91 a day. “They say to the contractors, ‘You’ve got x number of dollars, eight bucks a day per patient or whatever,’ effectively downloading the responsibility of meeting that budget,” she says.Often, these contracts are not just for patient meals, but the staffing and operation of food franchises within the hospital, plus housekeeping and custodial. The main conclusion of Padyani’s report was that food service is considered unimportant relative to the entire hospital.

Tom, a former prisoner introduced to me through the John Howard Society (which asked that I not use his last name), has served time at various correctional facilities around Ontario and suffers from diabetes and Crohn’s disease. He challenges Ross’s statement. “They don’t follow diets,” says Tom, who is in his 30s, was first locked up at the age of 12 and has spent more than 10 years behind bars. “Any jail food, you’re going to be on the toilet six times a day because what they’re giving you is running though you.”

Compass employs half a million people around the world (including 30,000 in Canada), and supplies food to schools, offices, stadiums, museums, mining camps and offshore drilling platforms, as well as hospitals and correctional centres. Of the company’s many customers, patients and inmates have two things in common: First, they are unable to go buy themselves something more healthy, or at least more tasty; and second, we, the taxpayer, are responsible for feeding them.Last November, Compass took over food services at the Regina Correctional Centre, a move that saved the Saskatchewan government $2.4-million a year. Lacking a Yelp page, inmates went on a hunger strike in January to protest against the quality of the food. “If you don’t like the prison food, don’t go to prison,” Premier Brad Wall responded. In March, inmates refused food again, in part because Compass had raised prices at the canteen.Ontario spends $14.54 a day per inmate to feed about 8,000 prisoners in 26 correctional facilities, for a total of $41.3-million a year, including labour and transportation. The food cost is $9.17 for three meals. Perhaps inmates should not, per our punitive view of criminal justice, be dining on lamb racks and truffles. But it’s hard to imagine eating healthy on $9.17 a day.

May 10, 2016

For my entire life, my doctors, my parents and my government have sent me one clear message about food: Nutrition is a key component of physical and mental health. So I had assumed (and hoped) that if MDs or MPPs were choosing menus for those in their care, the result would be a 3-D version of the Canada’s Food Guide chart I coloured in elementary school.

What do these campaigns accomplish? Undoubtedly, food drive campaigns get some much-needed food and money to local food banks. They provide great publicity for their corporate sponsors. They help companies appear to be good corporate citizens who care about local communities. They give those of us who participate a sense that we are "doing something" about a terrible problem in our midst. What they don't do is solve hunger.

Research shows that most hungry Canadians never even go to a food bank. And even those who do can never get enough food to keep them from being hungry. Food drives cannot solve hunger because they do not address the underlying problem of poverty. Across the country, political leaders, medical doctors, public health officials and ordinary community members are recognizing that the most effective and important thing we could do to end hunger is to provide everyone who needs it with a basic income guarantee or BIG. A BIG would ensure that everyone has enough money to buy the food they need

The list of BIG supporters is growing every week. It includes P.E.I.'s new premier, Wade MacLauchlin, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson, former Kingston and the Islands senator Hugh Segal, former Toronto mayor and current Senator Art Eggleton, Medicare defender Danielle Martin, the Simcoe Muskoka Public Health Unit, the Ontario-based Association of Local Public Health Agencies (alPHa). And the list goes on. In Kingston, a group of local citizens, including this writer, has joined with the Basic Income Canada Network to build support for BIG. An effective basic income guarantee would enable all Canadians to meet basic needs and to live with dignity. It would solve the problem of hunger by ending its underlying cause, poverty. It would address the income insecurity that is affecting more and more Canadians as full-time, permanent jobs are becoming increasingly difficult to find. It would unleash our creativity and entrepreneurial spirits. And it would reward the countless hours of unpaid and volunteer work that so many of us do.

Over time, a basic income guarantee would more than pay for itself with savings in health care, education and the justice system. And once there were no more hungry Canadians, a basic income guarantee would mean that food banks could finally close. Elaine Power is an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen's University and co-founder of the Kingston Action Group for a basic income guarantee. © 2015 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved. Illustration: • JULIA MCKAY/THE WHIG-STANDARD • Volunteers David Norman, left, and Ralph and Kathee Hutcheon pack up one of the 30th Hotel Dieu Hospital's Food Blitz brown bags with nonperishable food items in the warehouse at the Partners in Mission Food Bank in Kingston in May.

In 2005, Health Care Without Harm, an international group of health-care professionals, put together the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge to give hospitals guidance in improving the food they served in cafeterias and to patients. By the end of 2011 more than 350 U.S. hospitals had signed on. Almost all managed to substantially reduce their use of processed foods and saturated fats and to increase their offerings of local fruits and vegetables when available—one hospital even subsidized prices so that the healthiest choices were the least expensive. It’s still too soon to assess the pledge’s full effect, but given that some of these facilities have 600 to 1,200 beds and can cook as many as 10,000 meals a day, the impact—on patient health, on local economies—is likely to be profound.

The Canadian Medical Association and Canadian Healthcare Association both have policies on the importance of food and nutrition, but to date neither has taken a position on the issue of hospital food as a public-health tool.

rethermalization system that reheats pre-cooked food prepared in factories off-site. A money-saving measure that North American hospitals adopted en masse a decade ago, the method can cut labour costs by more than 20 per cent when compared to conventional scratch cooking. “Retherm” is largely responsible for hospital food’s present image—and taste—problem.

one percent of the institution’s global budget

“Many products don’t retherm well. It’s not as easy as it sounds.”

Quigley tells me it would take a huge investment to dismantle the existing system and bring back a conventional kitchen, not to mention the expense of retraining staff.

St. Mary’s has also devoted more of its budget to crops grown closer to home, buying cherry tomatoes and Ontario peaches at peak season to take advantage of lower prices.

Maharaj is a 35-year-old chef and health-food activist who, for the last seven months, has been feverishly working alongside staff at Toronto’s Scarborough Hospital to reinvigorate its patient menu with locally sourced ingredients and homemade dishes. With a $191,000 grant from the Broader Public Sector Investment Fund (a partnership between the Ontario government and Greenbelt Fund), Scarborough hired Maharaj to shake things up in their kitchen.

At the end of her one-year tenure, patients will be able to choose their meals from a carte du jour offering more than 20 dishes, such as salmon with a yogourt-dill sauce, Moroccan chicken and Greek roasted vegetables with fava beans.

Maharaj is quick to point out she has a major advantage: Scarborough still has a working kitchen (almost half of Ontario’s hospitals no longer do).

“Not a lot of money is devoted to hospital food, but there are ways we can make what we’ve got work better. The best way is to trim waste, and that means giving patients a real choice.”

hospitals across the U.S. have been holding farmers’ markets for more than a decade. And as it happens, the Kitchener- Waterloo area is home to some of Ontario’s oldest and busiest food markets. Putting up stalls at St. Mary’s seemed a natural extension

Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care (CCGHC)

Last year, the Ontario government awarded public institutions $1.5 million in grants to help with local food purchasing, which CCGHC hopes will inspire hospitals still lagging behind.

food quality is the primary objective driving St. Michael’s Hospital, a retherm facility in downtown Toronto, to introduce Ontario fruits and vegetables into its menu. Alex MacEachern, who heads up the hospital’s local food program

Since 2011 the hospital has in- creased its use of local produce by more than 30 per cent.

while St. Michael’s can’t prepare patient meals on-site, MacEachern and her team have nonetheless developed their own version of scratch cooking. They bring in fresh ingredients they assemble raw and cook on the hot side of the retherm cart, to create dishes such as blueberry crisp, baked apple crumble and red pepper frittata.

Almost 50 percent of the new Ontario items are actually less expensive than the imported item

In Ontario alone, more than 115 million meals are served every year in long-term-care homes and hospitals

hospitals have begun hosting regular farmers’ markets—Winnipeg’s Seven Oaks General Hospital and Cape Breton Regional Hospital among them. The Vancouver Island Health Authority debuted a new meal-delivery program, called Steamplicity, which steam-cooks raw ingredients inside sealed, heat-resist- ant packages. The method is quick— meals are ready in less than six minutes—and allows food to keep its flavour and texture.

Food is not seen as crucial to recuperation and healing. This is where Maharaj thinks doctors like me should do more. “You have an influential role to play in patients’ lives— you need to start advocating for people to eat better food. The bottom line is we need to find the political will to repurpose all those misspent dollars on a national scale.

St. Michael’s Hospital serves 97 different diet types, and has 47 different diets to respond to allergy restrictions

Fletcher notes that efforts to add fresh, local foods to the hospital menu meant that the hospital had to engage in conversations and partnerships with suppliers, including farmers and help them learn how to participate in hospital food procurement processes

Many hospitals have adopted an approach, known as ‘rethermalization’

The “kitchenless” hospital has been described as an innovation that can save hospitals about 20% of food services costs.

Companies such as Compass Group and Aramark specialize in food preparation for hospitals at large, off-site industrial kitchens.

the Sioux Lookout Meno Ya Win Health Centre located in Northwestern Ontario and serving the needs of primarily First Nations communities was required to have specific legislative authority in order to serve traditional foods, such as game meats and fish, which are non-inspected foods

The Scarborough Hospital is also aiming to improve the cultural appropriateness of food services, through their pilot project.

So in their study, Report on Food Provision in Ontario Hospitals and Long-Term Care Services: The Challenges and Opportunities of Incorporating Local Food, it follows that Padanyi and her team found substantial barriers to requiring that all public health-care facilities in Ontario incorporate local food into their patient and visitor food service.

Simply put, we're not there yet. We have a hard enough time agreeing on the definition of local food, let alone providing it en masse to sick and elderly people.

Having looked at some institutional case studies in our area, they say local food can be offered to patients and residents very successfully, on a facility-by-facility basis.

Realistically, though, not much will change on the hospital-food frontier as long as the province gives hospitals peanuts for food care. True, no one checks into the hospital for its food. But it's sure one more reason to check out.

Report on Food Provision in Ontario Hospitals and Long-Term Care Services: The Challenges and Opportunities of Incorporating Local Food

Carson estimated that 60 to 70 per cent of St. Joseph's operating budget is labour. That leaves just 30 to 40 per cent for supplies, which is typical for most hospitals, she says. Of that, about one per cent is spent on food: a bare-bones budget of $7.43 to cover three meals and two snacks per patient, per day.

Carson said she prepared simple meals relying on cheaper whole ingredients, buying canned tomatoes and raw onions and garlic, instead of more expensive frozen prepared pasta sauce.

"Our cooks are feeling really proud of what they're producing and creating,"

Working with raw ingredients also made it easier to avoid things like gluten, salt, dyes, allergens or other contaminants that could harm individual patients

say you have all the Toronto hospitals buying their lettuce from some supplier in California and there's a problem with salmonella or something. That could be really bad."

According to an outbreak analysis by the Public Health Agency of Canada, almost 80 per cent of confirmed cases lived in a long-term care home, or were admitted to a hospital that had served deli meats taken from large packages.

In early 2012, the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care produced a report on food service in Ontario hospitals and LTCs that looked specifically at the challenges and opportunities of incorporating local foods. It surveyed 137 food service managers, representing 16.7 per cent of the food service departments in all the hospitals and LTCs in Ontario. Food services managers placed safety at the top of their priorities (100 per cent). It was closely followed by nutrition (97 per cent); sensory qualities, like texture and temperature (97 per cent); and low cost (88 per cent). Least important to Ontario hospital food managers, according to the survey, were fairness or fair trade in product sourcing (30 per cent); food origin (24 per cent); and "naturalness" (15 per cent).

Eighteen per cent of acute-care hospital administrators reported using conventional cooking methods for patient meals "most" (80 to 100 per cent) of the time, while 70 per cent of long-term care administrators reported doing so.

Brendan Wylie-Toal, Sustainable Food Manager for the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care

This article was produced by Tyee Solutions Society with funding provided by the Hospital Employees Union (HEU).

But CUPE 7800 president Dave Murphy said the move is akin to a homeowner dealing with dated kitchen appliances by eating out at fast food places every night. "It's the same philosophy, except HHS will be serving (the equivalent) of TV dinners," he said. Murphy cited hospitals in Guelph and Scarborough, where in-house facilities were upgraded to serve higher quality, culturally-sensitive food rather than hire a large vendor that's out of step with local needs.

"This (vendor) food will be trucked down the QEW from some company in Toronto where the food is assembled, and microwaved at the hospital ... Let's keep the food prepared in this community." HHS says no jobs will be lost if they pursue a private sector deal, but Murphy says union "bumping" of positions will be disruptive for food services staffers, some of whom have worked in the field for more than 20 years.

Britain is following suit, reactivating a hospital food program the former government discontinued in 2006

Janice Gillan, the head of the Hospital Caterers Association in the U.K., who told CBC Radio, "Food is the simplest form of medicine."

The Sun, is campaigning for minimum dietary standards in hospitals

Ontario probably leads efforts for better hospital food, thanks to the provincial government making grants available to hospitals to purchase local food through its Broader Public Sector Investment Fund

Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care

Before 2005, nearly all the patient meals at St. Joseph's were pre-made and outsourced. Now, the hospital prepares about 75 per cent of them from scratch.

The move to home-style meals has not only seen patient satisfaction increase to 87 per cent but it's also had "a huge positive impact on morale," Leslie Carson, the manager of food and nutrition services

It has been estimated that about 30 per cent of hospital food ends up in the garbage.

Carson says that at St. Joseph's plate waste is about half that amount.

they avoid packaged meals

grain-fed beef they get from a local supplier

20 per cent of the food it serves is grown locally, contributing at least $140,000 per year to the local economy

$7.60 per patient per day, not including the cost of labour

The province does not stipulate an amount for patients in acute hospital care but the average is about $8 a day.

Retherm was the trend 10 to 15 years ago and is being put back into service

Over at St. Joseph's they also had to figure out how to make the changes to fresh and nutritious without a proper kitchen.

But Kelly Campbell, HHS vice-president of corporate services and chief planning officer, said the move will improve quality and reduce waste. Patients have been using a paper menu system to choose their meals a day in advance, which often leads to wasted food if the patient changes their mind. "Our menu is not nimble right now in terms of catering to patients closer to meal time ... the waste can be as high as 45 per cent at a meal," she said. Murphy expressed concerns about plastic packaging, but Campbell said they would be working with Compass to create a system similar to the one in place now with ceramic plates and silverware.

Campbell said the hospital corporation hasn't invested in their nutritional services in a long time, and patient food satisfaction scores hover at about 50 to 55 per cent. "We feel we can only improve from here, and we see in other facilities using contracted vendors, they're more in a range of 70 to 80 per cent satisfaction." CUPE and its supporters are also afraid that less local food will be used.

Between 18 and 20 per cent of HHS food is purchased locally, and Campbell said the number will rise under Compass management. "It will improve to about 50 per cent. It's much better than we can do on our own." jginsberg@thespec.com 905-526-3294

Two other briefings published by the Campaign today, called ‘Keep hospitals cooking’ [2] and ‘Making more of the money we spend on hospital food’ [2], reveal that: Patients prefer meals which have been cooked by NHS staff in the hospital’s own kitchen [6], and that preparing and cooking food in this way could cost hospitals less than buying delivered ready meals which are reheated before being served on the ward [7]. Only £4 of every £10 pounds (40%) spent by taxpayers’ every year on hospital food is likely to meet the Department of Health’s ‘compulsory nutritional and quality’ standards [8]. And with concerns about the accuracy of the results of hospital food inspections, campaigners believe that the number of NHS Trusts meeting the standards may even be less than this [3].

Alex Jackson, Co-ordinator of the Campaign for Better Hospital Food, said: “The results of the Daily Mail’s hospital food investigation help to support the findings of our own research, which informs our three briefings published today.

The reality is that, when a loved one is in hospital, you cannot schedule your meals at normal hours. You need access to nutritious food, not to mention to the relief from the stress of sitting by the bedside of a loved one who is ill, whenever it is convenient, for example when your ill loved one is being looked after by the medical staff or when they drift off to sleep. It is therefore an important public service to provide the members of the public who have to make use of the hospital with access to good, nutritious food beyond the normal hours when the rest of us have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. These cafeterias are not really "commercial operations" but part of the public service of a hospital; as CUPE local President Norma Robinson pointed out, nutritious food is a necessary part of a patient's recovery. It is also a necessary part of a patient's family members' continuing health.

Alternatively, maybe the smart thing for Horizon Health to do is to accept that food service is part of the public service that our hospitals provide and therefore get on with providing food services to those who use our hospitals as a public service, not as "commercial operations." This means that the health network needs to accept that providing adequate food services, including by investing in new equipment and putting the cafeterias in better locations to increase visitorship, will cost the health network money. The harsh truth is that trying to balance Horizon Health's and the provincial government's books by reducing the hours of cafeterias that, in total, are losing $350,000 a year is the public finance equivalent of trying to get rich by looking for loose change behind your couch cushions.

If the government of New Brunswick wants to have the health care system contribute to reduced government expenditures and a balanced provincial budget, reducing the hours of hospital cafeterias is simply a side-show; it will have no meaningful effect on the provincial budget. If the provincial government wants to reduce expenditures on the health care system in a meaningful way, it and the health networks should engage in real health care reform.

As part of these reforms, they should either close or downgrade a number of hospitals to basic health care and triage centres and build the health-care system around a few full-service, high-quality regional hospitals. If the evidence of other provinces that had a plethora of small rural hospitals but rationalized their health care service delivery as part of a health care reform agenda is anything to go by, these reforms will also have valuable side-effect of providing New Brunswickers with better health care and making them healthier. As well as not saving any significant amount of public money, closing cafeterias in hospitals or substantially reducing their hours, on the other hand, will not do anything to make people healthier, either. If it cannot make a serious contribution to either public sector cost containment or health reform and will harm people in the process, why do it?

an Peach has worked in senior positions in federal, provincial, and territorial governments and at universities across Canada; he also served as vice-president, Policy for the New Brunswick NDP between 2012-15. His expertise is in constitutional law, federalism and intergovernmental relations, Aboriginal law and policy, and the policy-making process.

food that accounted for nearly half (43 per cent) of its $194 million spending in 2011/2012

A year after it was created, the Lower Mainland BISS contracted out patient food services and house cleaning operations, both to Sodexo

10-year, $330-million agreement

Sodexo is responsible for conducting audits and surveys

a 2008 independent survey of patient experiences in acute care across all VCH facilities reported a dismal 52 per cent for "overall quality of food"

The glowing audits had been done by Sodexo's own kitchen staff

getting awarded these contracts is very competitive. Providing recipes opens the door to determining food costs and therefore profits.

Nor does Sodexo reveal its suppliers for specific clients.

there's zero accountability,"

"There's no traceability

"There's a reason why hospital food feels like it's sort of a last frontier in the good food movement. And I think it is in part due to the fact that it is the place where some of the stickiest, deepest, dirtiest corporate contracts exist."

in 2011, Sodexo paid $20 million to settle an accusation of fraud levied against it by the state of New York.

former Sodexo managers turned whistle-blowers, claimed that the company had pressured its suppliers for huge "off-invoice" rebates that were never shared with its clients.

The New York State Attorney General's office investigated, and found that Sodexo had in fact failed to disclose supplier rebates it received, and to pass the savings on to state facilities, including a treatment centre for at-risk youth and a service organization for developmentally disabled children, as its contract required.

Sodexo has "vendor discount agreements;" discounts on based on large-volume orders. "But there is nothing in our contracts to say that clients are entitled to that,"

Vancouver Coastal Health has actually reduced the reporting it requires from Sodexo. A Freedom of Information request showed that VCHA does not collect food purchase records from Sodexo, an item of information the original contract required.

Neither are there any records available for patient tray audits.

"While this documentation is indeed a requirement in our agreement with Sodexo, it is one that we ourselves have waived."

"patient food user committee." VCHA's 2004 contract with Sodexo stipulated that each of its facilities would set up such a body to provide ongoing patient input and feedback.

UBC Hospital never created the envisioned committee to seek patients’ views

A hospital union representative from Hamilton has launched a campaign to bring fresh food to patients, and says public input is welcome. The Keep Hospitals Cooking campaign, which kicked off in May, aims to pressure the hospitals to serve freshly prepared food instead of frozen, reheated meals. Kevin Cook, Area 2 vice-president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, spearheaded the campaign. He said hospitals have switched from preparing food in-house to contracting food service out to factories over the years due to budget cutbacks.

Kevin Cook, right, with his campaign partner Alex Jackson, is pressuring hospitals to switch from frozen, reheated meals to freshly prepared food for patients

Some $445 million worth of commodities are sent for processing each year, a nearly 50 percent increase since 2006.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has warned that sending food to be processed often means lower nutritional value

A 2008 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that by the time many healthier commodities reach students, “they have about the same nutritional value as junk foods.”

Roland Zullo, a researcher at the University of Michigan, found in 2008 that Michigan schools that hired private food-service management firms spent less on labor and food but more on fees and supplies, yielding “no substantive economic savings.”

privatization was associated with lower test scores, hypothesizing that the high-fat and high-sugar foods served by the companies might be the cause

in 2010, Dr. Zullo found that Chartwells was able to trim costs by cutting benefits for workers in Ann Arbor schools, but that the schools didn’t end up realizing any savings

Why is this allowed to happen? Part of it is that school authorities don’t want the trouble of overseeing real kitchens. Part of it is that the management companies are saving money by not having to pay skilled kitchen workers.

In addition, the management companies have a cozy relationship with food processers, which routinely pay the companies rebates (typically around 14 percent) in return for contracts. The rebates have generally been kept secret from schools, which are charged the full price.

Last year, Andrew M. Cuomo, then the New York State attorney general, won a $20 million settlement over Sodexo’s pocketing of such rebates. Other states are following New York and looking into the rebates; the Agriculture Department began its own inquiry in August.

the rebate abuses are continuing, now under the name of “prompt payment discounts,” under an Agriculture Department loophole

New York State requires rebates to be returned to schools, but the Sodexo settlement shows how unevenly the ban has been enforced.

Dorothy Brayley, executive director of Kids First, a nutrition advocacy group in Pawtucket, R.I., told me she encountered resistance in trying to persuade Sodexo to buy from local farmers.

The Agriculture Department proposed new rules this year that would set maximum calories for school meals; require more fruits, vegetables and whole grains; and limit trans fats.

the most committed foes of the rules are the same corporations

Their lobbying persuaded members of Congress to block a once-a-week limit on starchy vegetables and to continue to allow a few tablespoons of tomato sauce on pizza to count as a vegetable serving.

One-third of children from the ages of 6 to 19 are overweight or obese.

A food fight between hospital administration and kitchen workers is heating up as Hamilton Health Sciences gears up for a decision that will determine the future of food at hospitals across the city. The HHS board is meeting Thursday for a vote on whether to outsource its food production. The organization argues that its in-house kitchens need millions of dollars' worth of repairs - money that could be spent on equipment or patient care.

The poll, conducted by Vector Research between June 11 and 16, asked respondents whether they agreed that farm-sourced, in-house food production would improve patient meals. Fifty-four per cent of respondents strongly agreed, 32 per cent somewhat agreed. "Hamilton residents and local farmers have a clear preference when it comes to hospital patient food and that's keeping it local and cooking from scratch," CUPE 7800 president Dave Murphy said in a media release.

"The hospital is completely out of step with where the community is at, which is to support local community initiatives, business and farmers." CUPE members will make a presentation to the HHS board at 3 p.m. Thursday. ereilly@thespec.com

There are nearly 100 combinations of choices, from appetizers to desserts.

Behind the scenes, the technology has changed as well. Meals are assembled on ceramic plates in a cold room where a specialized machine seals each plate with a plastic cover.

Each cover has a valve that allows food to cook with steam pressure, a patented system that is also in use in several Ontario hospitals.

The plates are then transferred to another refrigerated locker, where workers dressed in fleece vests and toques assemble individual orders. Instead of transporting cooked food from a central kitchen across the 14-hectare Royal Jubilee campus, the food is heated in small pantries that are now located near each ward, in batches of five or six meals at a time, so that it is delivered to the bedside within minutes of cooking.

The flavours lean toward the bland

The cost to the Vancouver Island Health Authority is an extra $790,000 a year. That works out to about $3 per patient, per day. Mr. Murphy, who has sampled almost every dish, says it is a worthwhile investment. “People are eating.”

For the frail elderly and chronically ill, known high-risk microbes

we should aim specifically at zero tolerance for ready-to-eat foods

this is the situation almost three years after the listeriosis outbreak in 2008, when at least 20 people died as a consequence of eating contaminated meats

we still depend on company insiders overseeing inspections with no uniform national standards or process benchmarks

Canadians are usually good at regulation.

Canada needs to adopt rigorous food safety standards that value food safety over profitability,6 and enforce them with higher-quality and more active surveillance and inspection measures that put more emphasis on higher-risk foods.4

there are other changes afoot in hospital cafeterias — attempts to make the food more healthful

According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which put together a report on the "Five Worst Hospital Food Environments" last month, the Chick-fil-A chain has set up shop in several facilities

Boudreau has said the move will save the province millions of dollars through efficiencies brought in by a private company. However, the union's document paints a poor picture of privatization of services in health-care facilities in other jurisdictions. "We believe it is important for New Brunswickers to understand the impact of such a move, especially when it comes to the cleanliness of a building which the public relies on everyday," Robinson said. Last year, the Horizon Health Network started a regular audit of the cleanliness of hospitals being serviced by unionized public sector workers. Auditor General Kim MacPherson reported that health-care workers weren't cleaning their hands as required and that the standards to do so weren't even the same within the two regional health authorities.

Robinson said Friday that policies have been established and changes made that are addressing cleanliness concerns. "And they have improved on their targets of cleaning in the hospital sector," she said. The union claims its research into the three companies they believe are being considered to take over those services - Sodexo, Aramark and Compass - shows a poor track record. The union said it's also concerned about the quality of food declining. The union wants to keep the management of hospital environmental services in-house. It also wants fair wages and benefits for cleaning and food services staff to ensure against high turnover and gaps in training. The union also stated lay-offs and staff reductions would be a poor way to balance the budget.

"The cost associated with treating hospital-acquired infections, managing public relations fiascoes and defending lawsuits would defeat any possible savings while destroying the public trust." The Province of New Brunswick expects to have completed talks with a private contractor for the management of health-care cleaning and food services before the end of the year.

Bruce McFarlane, Health Minister Victor Boudreau's director of communications, said Friday that the province is "still in current discussions with the preferred proponent and we hope to have completed the process sometime this fall." McFarlane sent The Daily Gleaner an email statement Friday afternoon after the New Brunswick Council of Hospital Unions CUPE local 1252 released a 20-page document critical of the government's plan to privatize housekeeping, food services and porter services at hospitals. "We want to clarify that we are only outsourcing the management of the services," said McFarlane, who added that the ministry had not yet received the document.

"CUPE staff will remain in their union and will continue to be employees of the Province of New Brunswick." Norma Robinson, president of CUPE Local 1252, said she is "very concerned that the Liberal government is negotiating with a private firm to take over the management of food and cleaning services in the province's hospitals." Robinson said she's worried the move could lead to further privatization. In an interview with Brunswick News in April, Boudreau said the government wants to give the private sector a greater role in the province's health-care system.

Boudreau has said the move will save the province millions of dollars through efficiencies brought in by a private company. However, the union's document paints a poor picture of privatization of services in health-care facilities in other jurisdictions. "We believe it is important for New Brunswickers to understand the impact of such a move, especially when it comes to the cleanliness of a building which the public relies on everyday," Robinson said. Last year, the Horizon Health Network started a regular audit of the cleanliness of hospitals being serviced by unionized public sector workers. Auditor General Kim MacPherson reported that health-care workers weren't cleaning their hands as required and that the standards to do so weren't even the same within the two regional health authorities.

Robinson said Friday that policies have been established and changes made that are addressing cleanliness concerns. "And they have improved on their targets of cleaning in the hospital sector," she said. The union claims its research into the three companies they believe are being considered to take over those services - Sodexo, Aramark and Compass - shows a poor track record. The union said it's also concerned about the quality of food declining. The union wants to keep the management of hospital environmental services in-house. Calls made to Sodexo, Aramark and Compass were not returned by press time.