Food production and service in UK hospitals

Abstract

The paper provides a theoretical basis for process enhancement of hospital food production and the provision of high-quality hospital food.

Applying Value Stream Mapping to reduce food losses and wastes in supply chains: A systematic review

“…Among those studies that included only current state mapping, four reported an associated lead time (Darlington and Rahimifard, 2006;Lehtinen and Torkko, 2005;Taylor, 2006b;Vlachos, 2015), one cycle time (Simons et al, 2003) while four studies reported none (Ahmed et al, 2015;Francis et al, 2008;Kennedy et al, 2013;Melvin and Baglee, 2008).…”

“…Although state maps were in general graphically illustrated, two additional studies (Engelund et al, 2009;Sathiyabama and Dasan, 2013) only described the current and future states. There were six studies (Ahmed et al, 2015;Darlington and Rahimifard, 2006;Kennedy et al, 2013;Lehtinen and Torkko, 2005;Melvin and Baglee, 2008;Vlachos, 2015) that only used the current state map and one study (Noorwali, 2013) that gave a description of the current situation at a single plant level, against three studies (Francis et al, 2008;Simons et al, 2003;Taylor, 2006b) at a supply chain level.…”

“…Furthermore, studies on single chain members targeted the food service sector, i.e. two hospital kitchens delivering a variety of foods such as bread, soups and processed vegetables (Ahmed et al, 2015;Engelund et al, 2009) versus fast food restaurants (Rahimnia et al, 2009), or a food warehouse (Glover et al, 2014). Five studies have analysed more than one actor along the food chain.…”

“…With regards to food service, wrong meal service in hospital kitchens (Ahmed et al, 2015) and mismatching of customized needs for consumers at fast food restaurants constitute defects (Rahimnia et al, 2009). In the case where overbaked products were discarded in a study involving bread manufacture (Sathiyabama and Dasan, 2013), it is more likely that heat labile micronutrients were also lost.…”

“…defects, overproduction, inappropriate processing, unnecessary inventory, unnecessary motion, transport & waiting (Hines and Rich (1997)) through the development of a current and, through the application of other lean tools, a future state value stream map (Dal Forno et al, 2014;Womack, 2006). Its success has for example been shown in its ability to improve the effectiveness of value chain analysis by enhancing consumer value at each stage (Zokaei and Simons, 2006b), boost food production and service (Ahmed et al, 2015), minimize wastes in convenience food manufacture (Darlington and Rahimifard, 2006) and improve efficiency of a food contract manufacturer (Lehtinen and Torkko, 2005). Although previous studies justify its use in various industries as a tool to curb waste, none to the best of our knowledge has explicitly explored its adaptability to FLW with a specific link to nutrient retention; yet the potential exists.…”