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Proper nutrition is one of the foundations of a healthy lifestyle and can provide a person with significant improvements in both health and living standards in general. Therefore, recently, there have been calls to improve diet in all spheres of human life. This issue is especially significant in the context of hospitals, in which patients should receive healthy and quality food by default. This essay aims to analyze the dietary situation in healthcare settings to highlight existing problems.
Considering the issue of nutrition in hospitals, first of all, it is worth considering the menu of dishes offered to patients. Due to the nature of such institutions, the main factor for their design is the clinical needs, often associated with the recovery process after illness or surgery (Rosario & Walton, 2020). However, if the food on offer is presented strictly for medical purposes, there is a reasonably high chance it will look or taste unpleasant.
Combining medical and gustatory qualities in hospital food is one of the most common difficulties in the healthcare sector worldwide. Most medical workers, according to research, comply with the necessary sanitary and other safety requirements, thereby making food healthy (Osaili et al., 2017). However, a lack of aesthetic or palatability often results in patients throwing away their dishes. As Schiavone et al. (2019) stated, in the hospitals surveyed, the level of food thrown out reached almost 30 percent. This behavior reflects the inadequacy and variety of hospital meals, which, despite their medical benefits, cannot meet the needs of patients. Many approaches have been proposed to remedy this problem, from disguising healthy meals as fast food to delivering selectable meals (Tolliver, 2020). However, despite many solutions, a minimal number of them have been implemented in practice.
Thus, despite all its importance, hospital food is one of the most complex and problematic systems in which it is necessary to combine many elements. The need to create healthy, tasty food that will satisfy the needs of patients and at the same time not be unnecessarily expensive is an urgent problem. Although there are several ways in the literature to address this issue, at the moment, there are too many hospitals in which this problem has not yet been solved. Therefore, to take more active measures, this issue must be actively addressed at all levels.
References
do Rosario, V. A., & Walton, K. (2020). Hospital food service. In H. L. Meiselman (Ed.), Handbook of eating and drinking: Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 1007-1033). Springer Nature Switzerland. Web.
Osaili, T. M., Obeidat, B. A., Hajeer, W. A., & Al-Nabulsi, A. A. (2017). Food safety knowledge among food service staff in hospitals in Jordan. Food Control, 78, 279285. Web.
Schiavone, S., Pelullo, C. P., & Attena, F. (2019). Patient evaluation of food waste in three hospitals in southern Italy. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(22), 4330. Web.
Tolliver, M. (2020). How hospital food service can improve patient experiences and outcomes. Healthcare Facilities Today. Web.
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