Fast-food background a plus

The chairman of the Crown-owned health entity behind moves to centralise the production of hospital meals says his experience in the fast-food restaurant and supermarket sectors means he knows about safe food systems and quality control.

Under a plan revealed this week, food could be transported from production hubs in Auckland and Christchurch, with numerous existing hospital kitchens downgraded, saving more than $10 million annually.

Health Benefits Ltd (HBL) chairman Ted van Arkel, contacted in Sydney yesterday agreed his experience would be a plus in helping tender out what would be a complex supply chain.

Mr van Arkel is also chairman of Restaurant Brands, which includes Pizza Hut and KFC, and is a former managing director of Progressive Enterprises, which includes Countdown.

''Restaurant Brands is a very large organisation ... obviously in the supermarket business all fresh food is a very important part of the supermarket operation. I think you can say I do have some experience in that area. And health and safety issues come into it, very much so,'' Mr van Arkel said.

Rejecting Labour's claim the catering giant Compass Group was HBL's preferred provider, he said no decision had been made.

Asked about back-up systems in the event of a disruption, Mr van Arkel said that was the provider's responsibility, but it was premature to speculate, because nothing had been decided.

University of Otago health policy authority Prof Robin Gauld said backup options were critical in New Zealand where the population was thinly spread, and transport links were sometimes vulnerable.

Having a chairman with food experience could be positive for ensuring the contract was well designed, he said. HBL needed to be clear about the proposal, to allay public fear it had roused, he said.

''We don't want a Novopay around food,'' he said, referring to the troubled teacher payroll system.

In the event of supply disruption, health boards must not be left ''scrambling around local restaurants paying a premium to get all their chefs to provide 500 meals three times a day'', Prof Gauld said. Southern District Health Board member Richard Thomson said he was ''slightly torn'', as centralisation could be risky, and he needed more information about how the risk would be managed.

Southern DHB did something similar to Southland Hospital's kitchen when the regional food service was centralised to Dunedin about three years ago, so it would be ''a bit rich'' to complain now, he said.

However, he feared a loss of ''innovation and customer interface'' through losing the wholly local service.

He sympathised with staff, who might lose jobs, or see them downgraded. Health boards would be expected to agree to the move, because of HBL's mandate to find savings across the sector. Savings needed to be significant, and provide a boost for other aspects of patient care, to justify the single-provider move, he said.

The Dunedin Hospital kitchen has won favourable reviews from periodic taste-testing events.

-eileen.goodwin@odt.co.nz


Laundry service to be rationalised 

The hospital linen and laundry service is to be rationalised into a national outsourced system with consistent standards, in another Health Benefits Ltd (HBL) project to save money in the health sector.

At present, there was a variety of different service models, a tendency to overstock, cost discrepancies between health boards, and inconsistent processes, an HBL consultation document says.

Service and Food Workers Union national secretary John Ryall said the laundry and linen proposal was not causing the same consternation as the proposal to centralise hospital meals.

''At the moment, most of the laundry services are run by external providers, and I don't think in the laundry documents [HBL has] pushed so hard around the one provider.''

''We do need a good efficient quality laundry supplier for hospitals, but there's much more variation at the moment in laundry, because there's very little DHB provision of laundry services.''


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