Sodexo helps Salford Royal kitchen achieve five star status

Sodexo has helped turn around Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust’s patient kitchen to be awarded the highest rating by environmental health officers.

The kitchen, where meals for Salford Royal’s in-patients are prepared, has been given a five – the first time it has received the top rating.

Sodexo became involved in August, after Salford City Council’s environmental health officers had carried out a routine inspection in the patient kitchen and found that standards were well below what they should be. Although the kitchen was safe, inspectors recorded numerous flaws in food hygiene policy documentation and operational processes and gave the kitchen a rating of one.

The Trust immediately took steps to review and change its practices and enlisted the assistance of Sodexo for specialist catering expertise.

When environmental health inspectors visited the Trust on Wednesday (17 December), they discovered that significant improvements had been made and lifted the kitchen’s rating from one to five.

Simon Scrivens, Managing Director of Sodexo Healthcare, said: “We were delighted to be able to help the Trust to bring their facilities not only up to standard, but achieve the highest rating in the recent inspection report. Our team has worked very hard in partnership with the patient catering team to earn this excellent result, and we look forward to continuing to maintain these high standards.”

Simon Neville, Director of Strategy and Development said: “We took the inspection report in the summer extremely seriously and immediately embarked on a programme of improvements to ensure we could swiftly bring the kitchen back up to the high standards that our patients deserve.

“With the support of external catering experts Sodexo, our patient catering team worked incredibly hard to not only bring the patient kitchen back up to standard but to surpass this by gaining the highest rating.

“The majority of the improvement work focussed on ‘going back to basics’ and ensuring our practices and processes were all correct. We’re looking forward to even more development in 2014 when we will upgrade the patient kitchen facilities.”