Highland prisoners better fed than Inverness hospital patients?
When I wrote previously about the "five star hotel" experience I'd had during a spell as a patient in Raigmore I was referring to the care and treatment I'd received from the point of entry to the day of departure.
But in that five star summation I certainly wasn't referring to the food.
However another recent patient wrote to the Courier the following week to give her view on Raigmore. Sheila Johnston agreed that the staff were excellent - and I doubt if you'll find many naysayers with regard to that view - but the food was simply "dreadful", she said.
She will not have been dissuaded from that cutting verdict by the revelation that the daily amount spent on meals for those hospitalised there is £3.01. That's less than the cost of an M&S sandwich.
This information was uncovered by the Scottish Tories, who argued prisoners at Porterfield fare better than Raigmore patients, with more than £4 a day being spent on their food. I'm no fan of soft-touch justice but that still doesn't seem a lot. Prisoners will be hoping for a tastier menu when their new £200 million luxury jail opens in Inverness in 2026 after quadrupling in cost and being a dozen years in the planning.
I was only in Raigmore for five days and was just grateful to be healed, but in truth the food wasn't great.
On the first day I looked forward to my choice of salmon and broccoli pasta. It sounded good, but wasn't. I'm no gourmet with high culinary standards - my palate is attuned to the basics. But that Raigmore offering made the average supermarket packaged meal seem like a main course at Rocpool.
However the soup was very good, filling and obviously nutritious, and I tended afterwards to stick with that. But an elderly man in the bed opposite who'd been in for quite a while, far from finding the food "dreadful", almost seemed to relish it. He would present his choices to staff in a precise and deliberate manner. For breakfast, every morning I heard him repeat: "I will have a bowl of two - that is, two - scrambled eggs."
One afternoon I chose a cheese sandwich for tea and asked if lettuce or any kind of salad could be added. Not possible, I was told. So I received a thin slice of cheese between two bits of bread in a sellaophone pack and it looked so unedifying that I didn't touch it. However I also remembered that my late aunt, while in an Inverness care home, received the same type of sandwich along with a cup of watery soup every Sunday night when I went to visit her, and she was paying £1000 a week. In fairness she did say the food was better on other days.
The meal allowance at Raigmore and at other Highland hospitals hardly seems enough. Obviously money and funding is the main concern, and patients will surely always prioritise treatment and medication over food quality. But the standard of food served is not a complete irrelevance.
Kitchen staff are doing their best with limited resources. Some patients relish their scrambled eggs. Others think the food is poor, or even "dreadful". Health chiefs may have been embarrassed into trying to improve the situation in the weeks since that report appeared. Let's hope so.
I was only there for five days. The excellence in other areas was clear. But no one can be heartily satisfied with the fact that the amount spent on giving patients half decent meals is officially the most meagre and inadequate in the country.
