[lettie]

The hospital does not use salt in cooking but always provides salt and pepper in sachets which come with your meal. You are more than welcome to add salt to your own food (and it does make it taste better). The problem with staggering meal times for when the food is ready is that some people may get their lunch as early as 11am. Their tea may not arrive until 5pm or later. For someone like me, who eats little and often, a 6 hour wait for tea would be unbearable.

Times of meals are also timed to correspond to ward routines. It is impractical to have the meal trolley on a ward with a busy theatre list running. There would not be enough space to manoeuvre the theatre trolley bearing a recovering patient around the food trolleys. In an ideal world people would be able to eat what they want, when they want whilst in hospital. Unfortunately it is far from ideal but there is no quick fix solution.

Over the years I have become used to hospital food. Bear in mind that the staff get the same meals in the dining room as the patients get on the ward. We often don't get lunches until about 1.30pm. It is warmed up and dried up by then (that's if we manage a break at all). My solution is to douse it in salt and chuck a bit of gravy on it.....

I have to admit that the worst food I've ever had was Butlins in Skegness during the 1970's............