When I spoke to Paul Smith, a representative of European Care, which owns Austhorpe House, he said a large proportion of the residents there needed a “soft” diet because of their medical needs. “Not only do we have standards about choice but we are also careful to provide a good variety of food,” he said.
But I was surprised, too, that most homes serve their main meal by noon or 12.30pm, and that tea was often over by 5pm or not much later. Soon after that, I was told more than once, staff would start putting residents to bed.
At Ailwyn Hall near Norwich, I saw residents with dementia being served a pudding of fruit pie and custard at just after 11.30am. A spokeswoman for Ailwyn Hall said: "Residents have their breakfast early because some of them rise very early, and by late morning they really have to have their lunch. This has been OK'd by the inspectors.” When I said my mother preferred to eat her main meal in the evening, I was told that her lunch would have to be kept in the fridge for her and then warmed up as, “It would be difficult to do an individual freshly cooked full hot meal in the evening .”
Ailwyn Hall was in a small village, in a pretty setting surrounded by trees. But inside it felt dowdy — though the dining room was stripped bare because redecoration was under way. The home had two wings, one for people suffering from dementia and one for the frail. In the residential section, residents were eating a lunch of pork casserole with green beans, carrots and mash. But the vegetables looked tired and overcooked. One lady who did not like pork was given two small crackers with pâté and some lettuce. When I asked about this I was told that the lady had asked for crackers. A spokesperson said that: “We use fresh vegetables 95 per cent of the time, but residents like them on the softer side. However, if we have individual residents who prefer them crisp, we will accommodate that.”
I did visit some homes that impressed me, though — and one of them took me quite by surprise. The Chataway residential home, tucked away down a little residential street in Whetstone, Leicestershire, did not look prepossessing at first. Inside it was rather dark and cramped, and there was a rather unimpressive smell coming from a deep-fat fryer.
But then the manageress took me into the kitchen, which was tiny, for a look. “If they didn’t get their fish and chips on a Friday there’d be a riot,” she explained, before showing me a drawer full of fresh fruit and vegetables from the local farm shop which were served on other days. Her deputy was baking a cake. “Just a jam sponge,” she said casually over her shoulder as she turned it out on to a rack. I had visited five homes so far and this was the first time I had actually witnessed home baking or a fresh vegetable not boiled to within an inch of its life.
In the lounge, residents were chatting and joking together — something else I had not seen anywhere else. All the ladies — there were 13 here and just one man, who told me he absolutely loved it — had had their hair done, and several had made an effort with their best jewellery and make-up. There was a bit of a competition going on, the manageress explained. When one confused elderly lady, who had been asleep, woke up and began to cry, she broke off from talking to me to give her a hug. For the first time, I felt as if I was in a place that could feel like a home.
At £375 a week for a single room, the Chataway residential home was the cheapest I visited. But actually it was the exception that proved the rule. In general, my experience suggested you usually get what you pay for.
The most expensive home I visited was run by a major chain, Barchester Healthcare, which at Cheverton Lodge in Islington, North London, charges £890 a week for nursing care. Initially I was sceptical, if only because Barchester has been running something of a PR campaign about its food after bringing in the Irish chef Paul Rankin to give its menu a makeover.
At first sight, Cheverton Lodge felt like an upmarket hotel, with flowers in the reception and smart decoration. In some homes this image tends to fade once you get past the front entrance, but here the feeling throughout was clean, nicely presented and friendly. The manageress assured me all the food was fresh and, where possible, locally sourced.
I was surprised to see curry and bean bakes on the menu, and I was told that the Malaysian chef often produced dishes from his homeland. For tea on the evening I visited the residents had home-made broccoli soup and pasta bake.
When I spoke later to Mike Parsons, the managing director of Barchester Healthcare, he told me the chain had always focused on the appearance of its homes and on the food they served. He did not accept the BUPA view that older people did not necessarily want an adventurous diet.
“It’s about an attitude of mind,” he said. “Today’s 80-year-olds have stayed in the best hotels, they’ve been to Spain or on a cruise. They have reasonably high expectations. We have staff from overseas who have interesting cultural backgrounds, so why should we not have a Malaysian or a Chinese or a Filipino evening once in a while? It’s good for harmony and integration.” Barchester spends an average of £3.10 a day on food and drink for its residents. Its minimum spend is £2.60, which is only ten pence a day more than the minimum at BUPA homes. Barchester’s maximum spend, in its most expensive homes, is £5.50 a day while BUPA’s is £4.50. By comparison, the spend per day in hospitals is £2.50, in the Armed Forces about £2.20 and prisons £1.87.
More importantly, perhaps, Barchester spends more on staffing than other groups — so it can pay chefs (rather than cooks) to ensure food is freshly prepared. It can do that, at least in part, because it aims mostly for the top end of the market and a high proportion of its residents can afford to pay fees. Other homes — such as the Palms Row group, which owns the Kingsdale home that I visited in Streatham — survive on what local authorities are prepared to pay.
Julian Kendall, managing director of Palms Row Health Care, told me that his care home group rarely had complaints from residents about its food, though he did say it would learn from my comments about Kingsdale. But he added that he had recently had to tell Kingsdale’s chef to stop offering fresh pineapple to residents and to restrict the fresh fruit on offer to apples, oranges and bananas because exotic fruit was too expensive.
“We make sandwiches for people out of pre-sliced loaves. We don’t buy in wholemeal bread and chop it up ourselves because we can’t afford to do that. But it isn’t non-nutritional to do what we do. We do provide a wide variety of wholesome home-cooked food — but not everything coming out of the kitchen is wholesome and home-cooked.” He was right in one sense. It is not easy to make a profit, as all privately run homes must, on the
£400 a week or so that local authorities pay for care. Yet the problem is also about attitudes.
Restaurants in this country have started to serve fresh food because customers have demanded it. Schools have been forced by Jamie Oliver to look to their laurels. Elderly people in care homes cannot vote with their feet. And so, far too often, they continue to get what they are given.
See Jane Clarke's has scrumptious meals for the senior set
