Hospital food is officially shit

A year long study that concluded last September has reported that more than 50 per cent of patients in NSW hospitals are malnourished.

Two thirds of those patients either presented to hospital in a malnourished state or worsened while they were in hospital. Two dieticians working in the NSW health system told an inquiry into the hospital system they had no input into what foods were served to patients and no dieticians were involved at the Department Of Health, which developed hospital menus … no doubt overseen by accountants.

According to Rhonda Matthews, leader of the study:

“Malnourished patients are also more subject to infection, dehydration, diarrhoea, depression and their wounds take longer to heal.

“We’ve found that the patients who have some degree of malnutrition in our hospitals were staying in hospital twice as long as those who were not malnourished.”

Joanne Prendergast said food, linen and other non-medical services were not incorporated into the overall patient care from a medical perspective, and she recommended more flexibility for individual patients’ dietary needs. She said:

“If they’re getting the food (packaged) presented in that way and they couldn’t access it they didn’t eat it,”

“They’re starving if we don’t support their nutritional needs.”

I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone arguing that the food is shit. In my experience it certainly is - you really have to be starving to want to eat it (not to mention the weird meal times, which are undoubtedly designed around staff rosters rather than patient needs), and inevitably only about 1/3 of the food served up is even vaguely worth eating. My last hospital experience goes back 8 years, but my son was there last year and hardly touched any of his food.

Next startling revelation - airline food is shit, too!

Problogging makes news

Problogger Darren Rowse scored an article in the the Australian newspaper yesterday. Makes for interesting reading. In particular it sets out how Darren has made over $700,000 from advertising on his sites since 2003, and gives a bit of a history of his business as well as an outline of how Google Adsense and affiliate advertising work.

Some interesting points from the article I thought included:

• Each day 15,000 to 17,000 people visit Problogger.
• an advertiser will pay from $10 to $100 per thousand people. The average cost to reach 1000 people across all media in Australia is about $20.

and the tips about building traffic (presumably Darren’s):

• Traffic builds over time, which is why early blog adopters usually have more than new ones.
• Search optimisation helps build traffic, from the name of a blog to the words used in posts and tags.
• If you build a community and trust with your audience, you can make a lot of money from affiliate sales.
• There is less clutter of websites in Australia than in the US and potential to build internet properties with the .au domain.
• Give visitors the option to save posts to social bookmarking sites. They can multiply traffic.

Thanks to Meg for the tip on this article, via Aussie Bloggers.

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