While the options available might seem appealing to adults, they might not be to young children, with parents doing all they can to get their kids to eat. 

Having your child in hospital is stressful enough, many parents are facing another battle when it comes to getting their children to eat something.

Newstalk Reporter, Sarah Madden, dropped by The Claire Byrne Show to share what she discovered about the food menus and spoke to some parents about the struggles they're facing when it comes to getting their children to eat while in hospital.

She brought some of the menus with her to the show, showing the menu for Tallaght University Hospital which included Irish stew and roast chicken among others.

In specifically children's hospitals, Crumlin was serving cottage pie and barbeque chicken, while Temple Street had tacos, chicken parmesan and roast beef.

While the options available might seem appealing to adults, they might not be to young children, and this is an issue parents are having to try and combat during a very stressful time.

Sarah explained: "They sound very appetising, actually and I don't doubt that they're nutritionally balanced, but I know for a fact not one of my four nephews would go for any of it.

"Now, in terms of hospital food generally, Ireland has really pulled up its socks. The poor quality and the poor variety of hospital food used to be a staple debate in the media, but since Leo Varadkar declared a war on bad hospital food in 2014, new policies across hospitals were implemented and the standard has risen significantly.

"In fact, many of our hospitals now get praise for what's on offer, but when it comes to child-appropriate food, parents say the hospitals really fall down.

"[This] is a big concern because research shows one in five children in Irish hospitals are actually malnourished."

Sarah added that she had even seen "desperate families ordering Deliveroo and Just Eat to the hospital" just so they could try and get something their children would eat. 

Louise is mum to 11-year-old Jimmy who has been a patient in Crumlin since he was three and hospital food has been a standing issue for her since he was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma in 2019.

Tallaght Hospital Pic: File

"They don't want the fish pies. They don't want shepherd's pies. They want the chips, the goujons. They want a pizza. They want stuff that is really yummy.

"As a parent, you want them to be eating the veggies and you want them to have really good nutrition, but when your child is sick, all of that goes out the window.

"Hospital is grim as it is, [and] then if you're trying to force them to eat something that they don't want to eat, well, I just think that's actually cruel."

It's not just the fact that some of the meals aren't "kid friendly" but also that they're not procedure friendly.

Another parent, Grace, spoke about her son Rian who has a rare genetic condition called 22q11 deletion syndrome, and anytime he has to go into hospital, the food issue is added stress for her.

She shared: "It can be quite challenging when you're in there because you're obviously stressed because the child is unwell and then you're having to go out and source your own food a lot of the time.

"When I'm going to hospital now, I bring in my own stuff and I bring in a cooler box, but that's not ideal.

"In a normal scenario, you'd expect that there'd be something there that a child can eat. Even recently on his palate surgery, he wasn't really allowed to eat, so it was a soft diet, what they called it.

Temple Street Children's Hospital Pic: Alamy

"But the only option available for that soft diet in the hospital was mashed potato or ice cream, and some of the days they didn't have ice cream. So you're like, you're looking at a bowl of mashed potato, which he wouldn't eat if his life depended on it."

Sarah reached out to Valerie Kelly, clinical specialist dietitian with the What's on the Menu project, about the issues facing parents with regards to the food in hospitals, and she explained what's planned for the new children's hospital and how the system there will be different.

Ms Kelly said: "The catering model in the two main children's hospitals is kind of a more traditional model based around bulk cooking.

"It means that there are limited options available and these particular options maybe don't suit some of the children that are there.

"Also, obviously, there's a wide range of ages across the children's hospitals from, you know, very small children that maybe are just being weaned onto solids, right up until big kids with lots of calorie and protein needs up to the age of 16.

"In CHI, we have to try to cater for all of these and the catering model in the new children's hospital is a room service model.

"The child can order a meal from their tablet at a time that suits them and this room service model has a lot of evidence around it in terms of improving nutritional intake.

"So we're very hopeful that this new catering model will solve some of these issues that the parents have come up with."

Main image: Child eating broccoli at dinner table. Pic: Alamy