SHOULD HAVE DONE THIS BEFORE THE STRIKE
How many free hot drinks and biscuits are excessive?
Free hot drinks and biscuits would boost staff morale and cost less than 0.1% of the NHS budget, say researchers
Peer-Reviewed PublicationWhen free hot drinks and biscuits are on offer to healthcare staff, how much is reasonable to take before it’s deemed “excessive” consumption, ask researchers in the Christmas issue of The BMJ?
Might some staff be “taking the biscuit” while others end up getting the short end of the teaspoon?
And could imposing limits on free refreshments for staff achieve nothing other than fostering resentment and even counterintuitively increasing consumption?
To find out, they surveyed 1,874 healthcare workers and academics, asking how many free hot drinks and packets of biscuits they would take during a single visit to a hospital library before considering their consumption "excessive."
Having collected data over a four-week period, they found that respondents would take an average of 3.32 drinks before considering it excessive.
This is slightly higher than the average number of hot drinks respondents consume over a typical day when left to supply their own refreshments (3.04). Coffee is the drink of choice for just over half of respondents.
The highest number of acceptable free hot drinks varied by choice of drink. For example, respondents who preferred to drink free coffee would consume more cups in a visit than those who preferred to drink free tea (average 3.44 v 3.29).
Department of work or clinical specialty also appeared to have an impact on the number of free drinks deemed excessive. General practitioners, for example, would consume more free hot drinks than staff working in emergency departments (average 3.67 v 3.22).
Regardless of beverage choice, respondents considered taking more than an average of 2.25 packets of free biscuits to be excessive.
This varied by role, with doctors having a slightly higher threshold for acceptable number of packets taken than non-doctors (average 2.35 v 2.14).
The number of packets perceived to be excessive also varied by time in role (average 2.89 for those less than two years in role compared with 2.16 for those more than eight years in role).
Although no formal cost effectiveness evaluation was carried out, the researchers estimate that a centrally funded initiative to provide all NHS staff with three hot drinks daily (excluding milk) would cost about £32,692,935 (€37,987,556; $39,570,875) per year.
The additional daily provision of two snack sized biscuit packets for every NHS employee at a cost of 25p each would cost £128,188,286 annually; this equates to a total refreshment cost of £160,881,221 per year, or a not excessive 0.084% of the NHS budget.
The researchers point out that office workers have previously identified free hot drinks as a more important workplace benefit than free support for mental health, and free coffee is associated with improved morale and productivity.
“Given the current concerns over the morale, recruitment, and retention of NHS staff, the estimated £21.7bn cost of a potential staff exodus, and the well documented challenges facing providers of healthcare and social care, the provision of free hot drinks and biscuits could be a worthy and cost effective expense,” they write.
They note that limiting the availability of biscuits and hot drinks is certainly not in the holiday spirit, and they suggest that healthcare employers “should allow biscuits and hot drinks to be freely available to staff, and they should leave these grateful recipients to judge for themselves what constitutes reasonable consumption.”
JOURNAL
The BMJ
METHOD OF RESEARCH
News article
ARTICLE TITLE
Taking the biscuit: defining excessive quantities of free refreshments in a healthcare library
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
19-Dec-2022
Oat biscuit best for busy NHS staff tea breaks, finds study
Oaty treat ranked top in tests for energy content and dunk break point
Peer-Reviewed PublicationBusy healthcare workers can safely enjoy a cup of tea within less than 10 minutes, and the best accompanying biscuit for nutritional content, crunchiness, and dunking is oat based, finds a study in the Christmas issue of The BMJ.
After witnessing how NHS staff avoid breaks because of constraints on their time, researchers set out to identify the time taken to prepare a safe, palatable cup of tea.
In keeping with the tradition of tea paired with a biscuit, and because dunking may help tea cool faster, they also assessed four biscuit varieties for nutritional content and durability after dunking.
Their findings are based on six tests carried out with resources that could be commonly found in a staff room in the surgery department of the University Hospital of Wales.
After agreeing on the process of preparing a standard cup of tea, they collected data on the rate the tea temperature dropped and the overall time required for a comfortable, and therefore potentially safe, drinking temperature to be achieved (known as time to drinkable tea or TTDT).
They then selected four different types of round non-chocolate biscuit - oat, digestive, rich tea, and shortie - to find the best biscuit to pair with tea on the basis of nutritional content, absorptive ability, crunchiness, and integrity after dunking.
The researchers recorded tea cooling and TTDT data for each biscuit variety and repeated the tests three times with freshly prepared cups of tea. Biscuits were ranked first to last (scores 1 to 4), with penalty points given for adverse events such as scalds and breakability.
Although the results varied, important findings were that it takes around 420 seconds for a cup of tea to reach optimal palatability (61ºC) with 30 mL of semi-skimmed cow's milk, and just 370 seconds with 40 mL.
The oat biscuit ranked first overall after all six tests. For instance, it had the highest energy content (70 kcal per biscuit) and highest mean dunk time of 34.3 seconds to dunk break point.
The digestive ranked second. Although it had the lowest crunch reduction volume (15%) of all four biscuits, it crumbled in three tests of absorptive capability and structural integrity (saturation, dunk break point, and pragmatic dunk break point).
The shortie was ranked third, only absorbing an average 4 mL of tea during the three saturation tests, whereas the rich tea (the only biscuit given penalty points for breaking during the dunk break point test) was ranked fourth, although the penalty points did not directly influence the rich tea’s ranking.
Based on these results, the researchers suggest that NHS staff can easily enjoy the pairing of a cup of tea with a biscuit in less than 10 minutes.
Biscuit dunking also has a beneficial effect on tea cooling and should be encouraged, and the oat biscuit was the best at achieving this when compared with the digestive, rich tea, and shortie, they add.
The authors acknowledge some study limitations, such as differing opinions on how to brew a palatable cup of tea and limited biscuit choice, but say they are confident that their methods reflect a real world approach to tea making in NHS staff rooms.
What’s more, they say the joy of dunking a biscuit enhanced the tea break experience and could have an important place in teambuilding and connectedness between different hierarchies and disciplines.
Though changes in staff morale and performance were not evaluated in this study, they say: “Making time for a cup of tea is an important daily ritual, and it should be encouraged to help improve the mood and performance of healthcare workers.”
JOURNAL
The BMJ
METHOD OF RESEARCH
News article
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Direct Uptake of Nutrition and Caffeine Study (DUNCS): biscuit based comparative study
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
19-Dec-2022
No comments:
Post a Comment