East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust has become the first NHS facility to order Boka Food’s all green traffic light cereal bars. The Boka bars have gone on sale in staff and visitor restaurants and in vending machines across all five Trust hospitals. In particular they are sited at checkouts as a healthy choice impulse purchase.
The move is part of the Trust’s commitment to the recently launched NHS staff health and well-being CQUIN (Commissioning for Quality and Innovation), which is intended to improve health of NHS staff, visitors and patients. Among the specific requirements of the CQUIN is the banning of high fat, sugar and salt content foods from checkouts and a commitment to ensuring healthy options are available at any point including for those staff working night shifts.
Tim Radcliff, catering manager for the East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, commented: “Our vision is for the Trust to become a truly health-promoting setting through food and drink. We aim to meet nutrition needs for patients and have healthier eating in general for the whole hospital community. One of our strategy principles is to provide high quality, healthy and safe food for patients, visitors and staff throughout all food outlets and services including vending and snacking. We were really excited to find the Boka bar. As part of the CQUIN process we removed all confectionery from our checkouts and were then only able to offer fresh fruit. Now we can offer a cereal bar to our staff and visitors too and still meet the requirements of CQUIN.”
