A North-East chef will be destroying the myth that hospital food cannot be gourmet when he goes on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow.

Ron McKenzie has been head of catering at Darlington Memorial Hospital for five years.

This week he was crowned public service caterer at the BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards.

Mr McKenzie shared first prize in the category with a male chef from Stoke.

He has been feeding hospital patients in the North-East for more than three decades - at Sunderland Royal Hospital, Hartlepool General and now Darlington Memorial Hospital.

After winning the award, Mr McKenzie, from Sunderland, said: "I am over the moon - it is a great achievement for the whole department."

The judging panel said Darlington was: "A model of how hospital food can be."

Far from feeding patients mass-catered food, Mr McKenzie and his team put a lot of thought into the menu, and have even introduced organic milk produced by a local farmer.

Food fed to patients at Darlington Memorial is the same as that served in the hospital restaurant.

The menus are available in Braille for blind people and the team always makes an extra effort for special events - for instance, during the Wimbledon tennis tournament, patients tucked into fresh strawberries and cream.

Mr McKenzie said: "It is little touches like that that make an impression on patients."

He submitted menus and a taste-testing team visited the hospital to try out the fare.

John Saxby, chief executive of County Durham and Darlington Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said: "Our patients and staff have commented on the excellence of the meals over a long period of time."

You can listen to the awards on Sunday at 12.30pm and they will also be repeated on Monday between 4pm and 4.30pm.