Dispatches: Fit to Eat broadcasts on Thursday May 13th, at 9pm Channel 4
In May 2001, the Government launched a £40 million campaign for Better Hospital Food, including recruiting celebrity chef Loyd Grossman to revamp the menus.
According to Department of Health's own ratings, the scheme has been a success with food quality improving.
In today's NHS catering is increasingly outsourced to factories miles away from the hospitals they serve. Dispatches goes undercover to investigate whether appropriate standards of hygiene are being met in the making and preparation of cook-chill food. In further investigations, Dispatches examines whether the food dished up in hospitals has the nutritional value that patients have a right to expect.
Tillery Valley Foods in Wales produces 45,000 hospital meals a day. The food is prepared at its plant, individually portioned, chilled or frozen and then loaded onto lorries for delivery to hospitals throughout the country.
For eight weeks, Dispatches' undercover reporter got a job there in Plant 2 and over a period of six weeks secretly filmed what he saw at the factory.
Despite being promised on his first day at the factory that he would get the chance to take the Food Hygiene Certificate course in the next 4-8 weeks, our undercover reporter still had not received this after eight weeks. Some of his colleagues claimed they had to wait even longer, with one female worker claiming she did not do the course for almost a year.
Secret filming catches workers throwing food around and coughing and sneezing while preparing food. There are instances of even more unhygienic behaviour such as workers routinely eating straight from the production line and dipping their ungloved fingers into vats of cooked food. One worker failed to wash his hands after a nosebleed while another cleans his fingernails with a knife that comes into contact with the food he is preparing.
Giving even further cause for concern about hygiene, our reporter witnessed and covertly filmed a cooked sauce being left to stand slowly cooling for up to seven hours and then being portioned into meals. The Department of Health's own guidelines specify that cooked food must be chilled to at least 7°C within two hours to inhibit the growth of potentially dangerous bacteria.
Elsewhere a bucket used to transfer cooked food is rinsed out in water by a worker and placed on the floor before being reused. Dispatches' took sample swabs from this bucket and from five other receptacles used for cooked food for laboratory testing. The results were concerning with two of the six samples testing positive for E-Coli.
There is no evidence to suggest that the E-Coli found in the two samples is a harmful strain or that it was present in any food. Furthermore, the regulations controlling the cooking of cook-chill food requires that it be heated by the hospital at high temperatures which would destroy any bacteria. Nonetheless, according to food hygiene expert Paul Povey the levels are 'abnormally high' and 'totally unacceptable' and merited further investigation.
Povey says the test "demonstrates that there has been excessive contamination of these articles... indicating poor standards of hygiene with potential for food poisoning.
The food produced at the factory is going to hospitals and that means, of course, that vulnerable people may be eating it: namely the elderly, the very young and the infirm. And the risk of getting food poisoning becomes greater if you're in those vulnerable groups."
After Dispatches approached them with details of their investigation Tillery Valley Foods' Managing Director issued a statement saying:
"TVF is committed to providing safe, nutritious food. We therefore take the allegations raised by Dispatches very seriously. We regret that even six months after the secret filming and testing took place, we have not been allowed to see the evidence on which the programme is based.
We expect all our staff to operate to the highest stands of food hygiene. Any member of staff who allowed their behaviour to fall below those high standards will face immediate disciplinary action.
We have reviewed all the operating procedures at our factory. All staff have been reminded of their obligations to the hygiene rules and procedures and they have all been re-issued with the employee handbook. We are extending the use of CCTV into our food production areas and we are also reviewing the wearing of face masks.
However, we remain confident our procedures meet all industry standards. We are routinely audited by the relevant statutory bodies and in the last six months alone, we have been audited three times and each time we have passed those inspections.
TVF produce 25 million meals a year. In 20 years, we have not had a single incidence of food poisoning."
Dispatches: Fit to Eat broadcasts on Thursday May 13th, at 9pm Channel 4
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