‘I’m leading change for my patients and for my planet, and it feels really good’

This was a project that I ran at an acute hospital trust as part of my Florence Nightingale Foundation Green Healthcare Leadership Programme.

“Reducing food waste in an acute hospital as a nurse is a challenge”

Suzy Moody

I’ve wanted to contribute something to driving sustainability in healthcare for a long time. I thought I’d have to be more senior to catalyse change, but this was my opportunity to make a difference.

So why should we care about food waste as long as the patients get the food they need to recover? While carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions are important, they are far from the whole picture.

The more food we waste, the more we need to produce, so food waste is a driver for intensive farming.

This causes ecosystem damage through growing crops in monoculture, clearing land for agriculture, use of pesticides and insecticides (all of which reduce biodiversity), and leads to air, water and soil pollution, which are not sustainable.

By reducing waste, we reduce intensive farming and we’re moving in the right direction. Reducing food waste in an acute hospital as a nurse is a challenge.

I was blessed to have Serco as our catering contractors – they were open to improving food sustainability and enthusiastic about helping to drive change.

I spent a week gathering data (easier than it sounds – imagine 11 trial wards, 13 ward hosts, 10 housekeepers, three patient ambassadors, three catering managers, one restaurant manager, two back-of-house weighers, three hospital managers, one waste manager, over 8,500 steps a day, over five floors and two wings of the hospital, four days of weighing the waste from two meals a day, two buckets for each ward for each meal, one broken set of scales and one norovirus outbreak…), which led to some key recommendations for improving food sustainability in the hospital setting.

So, what did we change? Most of it was simple. We took some beef dishes off the menu. Beef has the highest carbon footprint of anything we eat, 10 times higher than chicken!

We increased the number of vegetarian and plant-based options. Then we jiggled the menu round to put the veggie options at the top, because people tend to choose things nearer the top.

I knew from patient feedback and ordering data that, although less than 4% of our patients say they are vegetarian or vegan, nearly double that number regularly order a veggie meal, so this was a change that was likely to be acceptable to our patients.

We started recycling food packaging. Our milk bottle plastic alone is equivalent to three whale testicles every year (if you’re not familiar with whale testicles, this is about the same weight as three grand pianos, but you’ll remember the testicles!).

And my favourite change, we introduced mini-meals – energy dense yummy meals for the smaller appetite.

Patient feedback showed that patients liked the food, but portions were simply too big for some people.

Work continues to monitor the impact of the changes, to recycle more of our packaging, and reduce food waste further.

For me, the most important thing was finding out that there are many people passionate about reducing food waste in our trust – we just needed the impetus of a project to get started.

In time, the financial benefits to the trust will become clear and that is a powerful tool to present to the board and ask them to keep doing more on sustainability.

The impact of the project is snowballing, as Serco have introduced many of the same changes to another hospital they work with.

And I’m presenting the project at a big national workshop on hospital food sustainability, so they can use us as an example of what can be achieved.

My big take-home message from the Green Healthcare Leadership Programme was that I didn’t have to be in a position of management to be a leader.

I’m leading change, for my patients, for my planet, and it feels really good.

Suzy Moody, adult nurse, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust