Staff at New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton, U.K. are facing a problem now common to health care workers around the world—how to safely procure necessary food supplies for themselves and their families. A significant number of staff are not able to shop during the hours earmarked for NHS staff, so New Cross Hospital (part of the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust) decided to do the job itself—and open a grocery store in the hospital staff restaurant. Advisory Board spoke to Adam Race, Deputy Director of Workforce at the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, to learn how they transformed their staff restaurant into a 'grocery retail outlet.’

Setting up the infrastructure

As with most hospitals, the New Cross Hospital staff restaurant was in minimal use due to social distancing restrictions. However, despite being closed for regular business, it was still equipped with functioning cash registers and plentiful space to stock merchandise. Additionally, the catering staff who ran the staff restaurant were easily re-deployed to stock, run, and manage the new grocery operations with support from facilities management. Lastly, security guards were deployed to assist with operations—and ensure that catering staff are able to maintain adequate social distancing with the appropriate number of customers in the store at any one time.

Getting the groceries

The catering staff already had existing contracts with local catering providers, enabling a seamless transition from canteen to grocery. Instead of ordering ingredients for meal preparation, New Cross Hospital began ordering basic foodstuffs in bulk, focusing on non-perishables that hospital staff could easily take home with them. The catering staff simply began ordering as they would for a normal meal service. Then, as the items arrived, the staff re-programmed the cash register to reflect the cost of individual food items and began selling them outright.

There was initial concern that catering-supply items, such as large containers of curry, would not be well-received by staff, but the catering staff were surprised to find that the opposite was true. Health care workers have such limited time to go food shopping that the ability to take home bulk, wholesale, prepared foods has proven highly appealing. Staff can also purchase a number of essential home items, such as toilet paper and cleaning products. Overall, staff feedback has been extremely positive and the canteen-turned-retail outlet is proving a popular shopping destination.

Tips for organisations seeking to implement their own in-house grocery outlet

A highly innovative solution, New Cross Hospital’s grocery shop relied on resourcefulness and flexibility. Adam Race noted that re-purposing existing spaces, staff, and catering contracts enabled a rapid, relatively seamless start-up. Additionally, he recommends that organisations start small in terms of stocking provisions, focusing on selling items that are hard for health care staff to get ahold of, such as toilet paper, bread, and other non-perishables. Lastly, in this time of scarcity, variety is not an important feature—stocking one type of sauce, one type of jam, one type of oil is perfectly acceptable and drastically simplifies the operations of an in-house grocery shop.