Since the lockdown began, people across the UK have supported NHS staff in various ways, including the weekly clap for carers, sewing PPE and providing a mountain of free food.
Yet the latter has created a conundrum for hospitals: how do they deal with donations from well-wishers which can arrive in vast amounts and often without notice?
“We had about 6,000 Easter eggs come in before and after Easter,” said Ainne Dolan-Williams, who leads the health and wellbeing programme at King’s College hospital trust in London. “They were particularly popular.”
Soon they were getting two and a half tonnes of fruit and veg a week from two local wholesalers, Smith and Brock, and Turnips, and meal deliveries from groups like Mealforce, one of dozens of organisations that delivers food from restaurants to NHS staff.
Now the hospital tells Dolan-Williams’s team every morning how many people need to be fed so that they can inform the suppliers.
The outpouring of generosity has led to a gentle debate among NHS staff, some of whom feel guilty about food and gifts they feel might be better directed at others.
San Sunkaraneni, a consultant surgeon in Guildford, tweeted last week:“As much as the free food to NHS workers is appreciated, I’d rather it went to people that really needed it. Shops are open and accessible now. There is plenty of food available for us.”
Pete Neville, a consultant gastroenterologist who works in rotation on Covid-19 wards in Prince Charles hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, told the Observer: “We’re in a poor area and there are high levels of deprivation and poverty. It is extraordinarily sweet of people and we are very grateful. But when you’re getting it night after night, you start to wonder about the homeless and the newly unemployed.
“I’ve spoken to an awful lot of junior doctors and nurses and secretaries and we’re all very lucky – we’re being paid a decent salary and we can afford to buy our own food. Perhaps the local food bank is a better option.”
Similar sentiments in a letter published in Metro last week from Dr Sutapa Biswas, a consultant neurophysiologist at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, prompted a response from Damian Lewis, the actor, who set up FeedNHS with his wife, Helen McCrory, the comedian Matt Lucas and Leon restaurants.
The FeedNHS coalition has grown to include Mealforce, FeedOurFrontline and BaxterStorey and delivers 40,000 meals a day to 84 hospitals in 10 of the UK’s largest cities.
“We at FeedNHS suspect the problem lies not with the formal coordinated relationship we and our partners have in place with hospitals, but with unsolicited and ad hoc donations,” Lewis wrote.
“We are feeding critical care workers who are finding it logistically very difficult to eat. This is not a ‘thank you’ for a job well done. It’s an essential provision of food to critical care teams to help them do their job effectively, and make it more likely they themselves will stay healthy.”
Andrew Muir Wood of Meals for the NHS, which has delivered 87,000 meals so far, explained: “Where people are wearing double layers of protective equipment, they have to scrub down when they want to leave. It takes 25 minutes to get changed, so it’s not like they can pop into Tesco. For those people, meals are dropped off inside the Covid zone and they can actually get a proper meal.”
