NHS England - National Low Carbon Menu Bank
Central recipe management solution for low carbon foods that meet diverse patient feeding needs
Food is a major contributor to the carbon footprint of the NHS, and plays a key role in patient care. NHS England set a goal of improving the quality consistency of hospital food (and the data about that food) and encouraging sustainability through the creation of a National Menu Bank: a digital platform hosting menu information to support the delivery of healthy, nutritious, sustainable meals in NHS hospitals nationwide. The National Menu Bank is intended to develop and deliver new menus more efficiently, by simplifying the current process and facilitating the sharing of best practice across Trusts.
Stakeholders
Client team 8, client stakeholders 50+
Size
c.30 resource days over three months
Project Type
Digital discovery and data design project
Year
2022-2023
NHS England required a competent agency to run a discovery phase for the project to ensure the solution met the needs of users, and was compliant with the Government Service Standard. The systems landscape for food development within the NHS is highly complex as a result of variable supply chains across different Trusts, as well as multiple recipe management, patient ordering and other patient feeding digital solutions. Food data modelling for recipes is already complex in an ordinary retail setting, and in a clinical setting there are additional recipe data requirements around patient feeding. Added to all that was the driving project requirement to model carbon footprint to reduce soft facilities emissions footprint.
Treligan were well positioned to tackle the challenge as a result of our previous recipe data modelling experience working with major hospitality companies like Whitbread, Hello Fresh and Greene King, in combination with our understanding of discovery projects and running stakeholder engagement workshops and user needs assessment. We had recent experience of food carbon footprint data modelling after working with Pawprint, and our knowledge of Government Service Standard methodology meant we could work to a proven framework that gave confidence in a quality assured outcome.
Project Retrospective
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The project helps NHS menu development teams, dietitians, clinicians and patients by ensuring the availability and accuracy of food information that is relevant to patient care and safety (nutrition, allergens etc). The project also meets the need to model areas of food data that are beyond the usual areas of specialism for food development teams - in this case, carbon footprint - which would otherwise not be feasible. All of this improves efficiency and the patient experience.
Our discovery and user needs work has laid strong foundations for an effective National Menu Bank solution, where even small incremental improvements to improve the sustainability profile of recipes can have far reaching positive societal impact - each year the NHS serves more than 140 million meals to patients and many more to staff and visitors.
The planned menu bank also specifically facilitates greater opportunities for selecting locally-sourced ingredients and reducing food waste.
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Throughout the project, the main challenge we faced was a relatively short timeframe and highly complex operating environment in terms of organisational structure, supply chain relationships and food technology systems. During user research workshops we had to adapt quickly to understand different models of food service delivery across very different care settings, with variable catering facilities.
Certain stakeholders were at risk of feeling disenfranchised by the inception of a menu bank, as a result of perceived skills erosion through process automation. This could have resulted in less meaningful, lower value user input but we worked with these stakeholders to ensure the risk of these unintended consequences were captured in the report and mitigations discussed, so they stayed engaged and we got richer user feedback.
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The project culminated on time and to budget with the production of a Discovery Report (and supporting user-needs capture evidence) that achieved all of the project objectives. We’d worked efficiently throughout the project and with remaining resources we were able to deliver some additional scope, around high level technical options for delivery of the menu bank solution, and a conceptual data flow diagram.
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For Treligan this was rewarding as a first significant project in the healthcare sector, and because it supports multiple aspects of sustainability - good health & wellbeing, responsible consumption and production, and of course climate action. It was also good to lean into some of the founders previous technical experience in food data management and apply this in a new setting.