Sugar tax in hospitals
Simon Stevens is proposing a concerted national effort to remove from supply or reduce consumption of unhealthy food across NHS facilities including hospitals and health centres.
He believes the public sector needs to get its own house in order and the NHS needs to start practising what it preaches. These proposals will be synched up with the Government's forthcoming national childhood obesity strategy.
Key building blocks for the NHS to include:
A. New tougher food and nutrition standards for food served to patients on hospital wards, and cooked for staff in canteens.
B. For food and drinks sold in hospital retail outlets and vending machines, will consult shortly on trusts imposing a fee ('tax') to be paid by the vendor for each sugar sweetened beverage sold, or an equivalent mechanism.
C. Hospitals to retain all proceed from the 'NHS sugar tax' - could initially be worth £20-40m with matching incentive funding from 'CQUIN' fund - but they will be required to reinvest it in staff health and wellbeing programmes, building on the successful approaches being implemented in the first 12 NHS bodies now leading this work.
D. Rolling programme of contract renegotiation as contracts / franchises come up for renewal to ban unhealthiest junk food from vending machine (NHS doesn’t sell cigarettes on its property, and has gone smoke free) and require offer of healthier affordable tasty alternatives.
Kawther Hashem, Registered Nutritionist and Researcher for Action on Sugar said: “We very much welcome a levy on sugary drinks in hospitals. It is time the NHS truly led by example in the fight against obesity. But as Stevens mentioned reformulation and other policy measures are important. Therefore, the Government must come up with a strong and comprehensive plan to tackle the spiralling cases of overweight, obese and diabetic patients.”
