Hot food deliveries for NHS workers over the Easter weekend

Dorset Council and local brewers Hall & Woodhouse teamed up over the Easter weekend to show their support for Dorset’s NHS workers.

Deliveries of free homemade pub favourites were made to five community hospitals and three local hubs across the county as a special thank you to staff working over the bank holiday weekend.

About 243 meals were made and delivered by Hall & Woodhouse to Dorset HealthCare staff working over Saturday and Sunday at:

• Shaftesbury’s Westminster Memorial Hospital
• St Leonard’s Community Hospital
• Wareham Community Hospital
• Weymouth’s Community Hospital and nearby Westhaven Hospital
• Community hubs in Purbeck, Dorchester and East Dorset.

Teams feasted on roast lamb with all the trimmings, beef stroganoff and rice, steak and Tanglefoot pie with mash, apple pies, hot cross buns and much more.

Anthony Woodhouse, Chairman of Hall & Woodhouse, said:

“Our teams live and breathe our purpose of making people’s day and serving our communities. With all our pubs temporarily shut, you can imagine how pleased the teams at the Olive Branch, Wimborne, and the Duchess of Cornwall, Poundbury, were to be given the opportunity to provide meals for the fabulous NHS staff in a number of Dorset hospitals over the Easter weekend.

"We hope that our pub favourites, will in our own small way, show our thanks to the frontline heroes providing a beacon of light in the dark days of this crisis.”

Dorset Council portfolio holder for Adult Social Care and Health, Cllr Laura Miller said:

“The council is working really closely with our NHS partners as part of the work to shield our community from coronavirus and we just wanted to say thank you to everyone who worked over Easter doing their bit to help local residents.

“When we realised that some people working over the Bank Holiday might be missing out on a hot meal we wanted to put something in place and show our support. We are really grateful to Hall & Woodhouse for the generosity and flexibility they have shown as part of this joint initiative - by all accounts their deliveries were really well received.”

Helen Persey, Head of Community Services (West) at Dorset HealthCare, said:

“I would like to say a huge thank you to Dorset Council and Hall & Woodhouse for providing our frontline community teams with a range of incredible food over this Easter weekend. I am extremely proud of all our Trust’s staff and the vital work that they are doing during this challenging time – this kind gesture gives a lovely message of ‘thank you’ to our teams!”

Vanessa White, Team Lead and Physiotherapist at Dorset HealthCare’s Shaftesbury’s Integrated Community Rehab Team, said: “It was such a treat, we all really enjoyed it and staff were commenting that it was a fantastic to receive meals like this when they were working Easter day.”