A Raigmore Hospital patient has hit out at the standard of food she was served while being treated over the New Year period.
It follows the revelation that more is spent on feeding prisoners in Inverness than on patients in NHS Highland hospitals.
Figures obtained under Freedom of Information showed the health board spends £3.01 a day feeding patients, compared to the £4.05 spent on prisoners at HMP Inverness.
Alicia Stewart, 67, who spent two days in Raigmore recently, got in touch after reading our story.
The grandmother from Nairn said: “I read the article, I was there. I was living through it. It was absolutely appalling”.
Raigmore hospital food: ‘Slimy and horrible’
Mrs Stewart, who is now recovering at home, suffered a broken leg in a fall while visiting family in Dunblane.
After initially being taken to Forth Valley Hospital in Larbert, she was admitted to Raigmore around noon on Hogmanay and was operated on three hours later.
She said that after fasting for eight hours the previous day and then two hours of surgery, she was given a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea around 7pm on December 31.
The following morning her breakfast porridge was “slimy and horrible” and she refused to eat it.
After requesting something else, Mrs Stewart said she was given cold toast, some marmalade and an apple.
For lunch on New Years Day she was served a salad that consisted of “wet” lettuce, three slices of cucumber, two wedges of “rock hard” tomato, a portion of potato salad with hard potatoes and two slices of cold, tinned ham.
“There was no seasoning, no dressing, the vegetables were horrible. It was awful.”
‘Medical care was excellent, the food was awful’
On the night she was discharged Mrs Stewart was offered dinner of a chicken, tuna or egg salad sandwich.
In the meantime, her husband had taken food into the hospital for her.
She now intends making a complaint about the standard of meals.
She added: “The medical care I got in Raigmore was excellent, they were on the ball with that. But the food was awful.
“I bet they throw away more food in that hospital than anybody eats.
“I found it extremely insulting to read that prisoners in HMP Inverness get more money spent to feed them than people trying to recuperate in hospital.
“I’m sure the chefs in hospitals try really hard, they do the best they can with what they have.
“But what they have is so little I think it’s a miracle they do what they do with it.”
Raigmore serves more than 40,000 meals a month
A spokesman for NHS Highland said: “We are sorry that the patient feels the food served during their recent stay in hospital was not of the standard they would expect.
“We deliver 41,357 meals a month in our production kitchen at Raigmore.
“However, our patient care and customer satisfaction are paramount and we very much appreciate patient feedback to help us improve our service.
“NHS Highland follows the National Food in Hospital policy to ensure the correct nutritional advice is followed post-surgery and meals are ordered at ward level to make sure the correct food is ordered in accordance with the correct patient pathway.”
The spokesman confirmed hot food is unavailable after 6.15pm, but a selection of sandwiches are available.
He added: “If the offering is unsatisfactory, the kitchen is able to provide an alternative upon request from the ward.”
He added that the iWave catering system was introduced at the National Treatment Centre, to care for post-surgery patients.
This offers up to 30 different meal choices day or night and has proved very successful.
So which menu would you prefer?
The meals on offer at Raigmore for New Years Day lunch were lentil soup, followed by steak pie, macaroni cheese or ham salad, with mixed veg, potatoes and bread and butter
Desserts were lemon gateaux or fresh fruit.
A sample prison menu was released recently under FOI.
A typical day included lunch of a four fish finger wrap with tomato sauce and salad, penne pasta bolognaise with salad, or cheese wrap with salad cream and salad.
Dinner was link sausages with onion and mashed potatoes, haggis and potatoes or savoury soya mince with potatoes with ice cream and fruit.
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