Hospital Food

I just spent another few days in hospital after having another stoma revision. The surgery went well and I am 95% recovered.  The nurses and staff were great once again (except when I was to be discharged; took way too long) but I always seem to have an issue with the food. Not because of the taste or anything, but with my Crohn's, I have dietary restrictions. Trying to convey this seems to always be a problem which shouldn't be.

Now, I get that patients need to get the necessary vitamins and nutrients while in hospital but if the patient does not eat the food or drink because they can't, then I am thinking about all the wasted food each hospital must throw out because it cannot be re-used (prepackaged food or drink) for the germs.

I do not have a problem with the food itself, sometimes it is quite tasty (definitely an improvement since the 1980's) but I am going to use my last hospital admission as an example.

I let the nurse know what I could and could not eat (roughly) after the dinner arrived following my surgery. It consisted of rice, carrots, chicken, mandarin orange slices, coffee and Ensure. From all of that food, I ate a little bit of the chicken as I just had surgery on my intestine and experience has told me to not overdue it on the first meal. I drank a lot of water instead. When the nurse came in to check, I told her that I have Crohn's and I could not eat the carrots (they would have to be way softer than they were), nor the oranges (too much fiber in the skin which goes right through me), and especially the Ensure. There is too much "stuff" in Ensure which causes diarrhea for me. I told her that I also could not handle dairy products, so no milk, etc.  I mentioned that it would be great to have peanut butter as this is a protein my body can handle.

No surprise, breakfast came with cream of wheat, milk, coffee and Ensure again. Needless to say, I did not have breakfast but the nurse did bring me some cold toast later. I explained, again, what I could and couldn't eat. Lunch came and same issue and so on and so on. So I would pick through things I could eat but I never had a full meal while in hospital for three days. Each meal came with Ensure after telling who would listen that I could not drink it.

I am not sure whether the nurses never conveyed the message properly or no one was listening. The message must have gotten through though because the paper menu that comes stated "Crohn's restricted diet" yet still was given food I could not drink. Obviously they have a program in the kitchen and when they punch in "Crohn's" certain menu items pops out, but not taking in the individual patient's feedback. 

So, three meals a day for three days and 98% of everything I received needed to be thrown out.

Even in hospital I can't get away from lumping all us IBD patients into one category, not taking in the fact that we experience IBD differently. If I was staying in hospital for longer, I would have requested a dietitian to come see me. I have had this many times before and they are great at getting what I need for meals but as I was only going to be in for a few days I did not see the point this time.

I think hospitals need to make some changes to their nutrition program and maybe allow patient's to make changes because of dietary restrictions after that first meal, like maybe something on the paper menu that could be returned to staff almost like a suggestion box or on the pre-admission form. I realize they probably can't do this with the hundreds of patients but something needs to change and hospitals may want to have a patient advisory board for these types of things.

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