Australian Health Directory

Hospitals, medical and aged care facilities require a wide range of food service equipment to cater for in-patients, day patients, staff and visitors. While there is a growing trend to outsource hospital catering, a considerable proportion of healthcare facilities prefer this function to be internally managed to have direct control of cost and quality. Many healthcare facilities are large and can achieve economies of scale in-house.

In-house healthcare facility food services departments need state-the-art commercial kitchens, food service and distribution equipment. In addition, they often manage separate staff cafeterias and visitor cafes.

Healthcare commercial kitchens mostly use standard commercial equipment, but also need special hospital food service equipment. These include special food delivery vehicles that fit narrow hospital corridors, food lifts in multi-storey hospitals, hospital food trolleys, food trays and utensils suitable for disabled and older people, special signage, packaging and date stamps, water quality instruments, large capacity ice dispensers and coffee machines. Temperature control for example is an important risk management issue in healthcare kitchens - due to the the food having to travel a distance to the patient bedside. This is addressed by special fridges and food trolleys equipped with data loggers to meet food safety laws.

In this section of the directory, we list companies that supply food service equipment to hospital, medical and aged care facilities.