"Availability of gluten free food for patients"

My elderly mother recently spent over a week in Ward A31 in Forth Valley Royal Hospital. All of the staff were kind, caring and clearly wanted to do their best by their patients. I'd like to thank them for their care and compassion.

However, my mother has coeliac disease and must avoid all gluten in her food. My mother and I were both delighted to discover that FVRH has a separate gluten free menu for patients, with choices for each meal. However on three or four occasions during my mother's stay Serco staff, when taking meal orders, offered my mother food from the normal, gluten-containing menu and not from the separate gluten free menu. This was despite it being clearly marked that she must not be given gluten on a board at the nurses station and on the whiteboard above her bed.

Fortunately my mother was not confused and does not have dementia and as, like many coeliacs, she is hypervigilant about eating outside the home, she picked up on this and checked to make sure that she was being offered gluten free food. If she hadn't checked, she would have been glutened and would have been very ill with constant vomiting.

The coeliac community is haunted by a recent news story about the death of an elderly patient, who had coeliac disease and a number of other medical conditions. Whilst in hospital - despite warnings from family and medical notes stating she was coeliac - this patient was given a gluten-containing cereal for breakfast. It was later found that material from the stomach had been inhaled into her lungs, causing an infection which led to the patient's death. At the inquest into this death, the coroner reached a conclusion of misadventure, contributed to by neglect.

I don't blame the staff for offering my mother food from the wrong menu - I feel it could be a matter of inadequate training. Perhaps it hasn't been made clear how serious the consequences of being offered the wrong food can be, especially in a situation where many patients may be confused. It also made my mother and me fearful that the kitchen staff might also be inadequately trained and wouldn't be aware of the importance of avoiding cross contamination in the kitchen.

To address similar issues, another hospital gained Gluten Free accreditation from Coeliac UK, the charity for people with coeliac disease, They have undertaken training and developed learnings on best practice on storage, labelling, preparation and cross contamination. Through the GF Accreditation scheme, they are now able to safely produce gluten free food which meets the strict criteria of Coeliac UK's GF standard. Could this be considered at FVRH? So much effort must have been put into the development of the gluten free menu, it is disappointing to realise that the danger of being glutened, with potentially fatal consequences, is still there.