The food is so bad that patients are starving

As nothing less is expected from local health boards, a damning submission was made to an enquiry yesterday.

• Public hospital food was so "atrocious" and menus so inflexible that half of all patients were "starving" and ended up staying twice as long as a result
• 51 per cent were malnourished - and many had not entered hospital in that state
• Had no set nutritional standards for meals
• Malnutrition is rife in our public hospitals and we need to do something about it
• We have patients starving
• Standard of food was frequently described as "atrocious" and "absolutely appalling"

Little wonder the health authority is referred to as

a dysfunctional but powerful, centralised, hierarchical autocracy with little or no external accountability

The excuse offered?

It's been divorced from clinical care and it's being seen very much as a business unit … we can lose sight of the fact that it's patients we're dealing with. It's not an airline.

Thinking where is this happening in the good old NZ health system? Could this really happen here? Had you going there for minute? Fortunately readers, it is an enquiry into the the state of hospitals here. Just do not get sick when you emigrate there.