Providing the best care to patients and families at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt doesn’t always mean administering medications, caring for the most common health issues or tackling complex diseases.
Sometimes healing goes beyond traditional methods.
Food is one of the necessities in life. Not all families have adequate access to nutrition, especially during the transition from the hospital to home.
Since the Vanderbilt Child Health Poll was first launched in 2021, food insecurity has climbed from 32% in 2021 to 39%-41% for the past three years.
Enter Champ’s Cupboard at Monroe Carell, a food resource program designed to serve as a bridge for families with nutrition access issues. The program comes on the heels of a successful pilot that saw two-thirds of eligible patient families secure aid from Champ’s Cupboard.
“A group of us met with a large multidisciplinary team to discuss how we could best assist families that did not have access to the food they needed,” said Cristin Fritz, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Pediatrics at Monroe Carell.
“The fact that the food insecurity rate has remained persistently elevated over the past three years is evidence that currently available programs (in their communities) are inadequate to support families. We saw the need to improve nutrition security of families we treated.”
Fritz said the first tangible response was providing eligible families with food at the time of discharge.
How the program works
During the hospitalization admission process, families fill out a standardized screening form that is provided in English, Spanish and Arabic to identify food insecurity.
If the screening shows the presence of food insecurity, families receive a “Take-Out Ticket,” a voucher for a box of nonperishable food or a family-size frozen meal upon discharge.
Families can either present the voucher to the Family Resource Center staff or items can be brought to the patient’s room.
The response to the program has been overwhelmingly positive, said Fritz.
A few comments include:
- “On top of it feeding my family, it was super easy to pick up and bring to the car, leaving the hospital was a very smooth process, and they made it accessible to everyone depending on their situation (handicap, disabled, elderly, etc.), there was no shame or embarrassment when picking up the box, no one in the halls seemed to notice, it was very discrete, the labels were small, so no one thought twice about it, which made me feel comfortable.”
- “It took one less stressor off my plate. I was able to not worry about what we were going to eat for dinner or having to prep anything.”
- “We were able to focus on our child instead of trying to cook a meal.”
Fritz and her team feel families are being helped and are looking forward to expanding the program.
“I hope to see Champ’s Cupboard grow in multiple ways, making it a permanent resource available to our families and expanding the types of food we can provide, including fresh produce and meals that accommodate dietary restrictions and cultural preferences,” said Fritz. “We need to identify tangible strategies to improve families’ ability to afford and access nutritious foods in order to see an improvement in food insecurity.”
The program works with community groups Second Harvest Food Bank and The Nashville Food Project, with plans to collaborate with Rooted Community Health, an initiative within the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University Medical Center that provides community-supported agriculture (CSA) shares to VUMC employees at a discount rate.
According to data from the Vanderbilt Child Health Poll, 4 in 10 Tennessee parents reported unmet food, utility or housing needs for their families within the last 12 months, with food insecurity being the most common at 39%.
Since the Vanderbilt Child Health Poll was first launched in 2021, food insecurity has climbed from 32% in 2021 to 39%-41% for the past three years.
