ST. LOUIS — SSM Health is stocking its hospitals’ shelves with a different kind of medication: whole grains, canned produce and protein.
After seeing a need among hundreds of patients, the health system will be sending home two days’ worth of nutritious meals for qualifying patients and their households through a partnership with the .
The Bread Basket Program will begin by mid-November at all seven of SSM Health’s adult hospitals in ºüÀêÊÓƵ, ºüÀêÊÓƵ County and St. Charles County.
“We are trying to make a concerted effort to acknowledge that those factors matter to our patients so therefore it matters to us,†said Karen Bradshaw, SSM’s director of community health for the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region.
The program is in addition to 15 free drive-thru food distribution fairs SSM and the Foodbank have held at ºüÀêÊÓƵ-area SSM facilities. The fairs are open to any resident and have served over 7,000 people, Bradshaw said, with three more fairs to go before the end of the year.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture showing 44 million households, including 13 million children, experienced food insecurity in 2022, an increase of 31% overall and 44% for children from the previous year, and the highest rate since 2014.
The end of pandemic-era relief efforts, and the rising cost of food and housing are making it harder for families to make ends meet, the report found.
are in need of food assistance, according to ºüÀêÊÓƵ Area Foodbank, which distributes food to more than 600 pantries and other organizations in 14 counties in Missouri and 12 in Illinois.
Back in January of this year, SSM Health providers began screening admitted patients across its hospitals to measure “social determinants of healthâ€Â — access to healthy food, housing and utilities — in an attempt to identify challenges patients are facing on a daily basis.
“Those factors are as impactful, if not more impactful, in someone’s overall health and well-being than actual direct medical care,†Bradshaw said.
What providers found was that about 600 patients a month revealed that they were food insecure — meaning they answered yes to standardized questions about not having enough food for them or their families over the past year.
“It gave us a knowledge base to try and figure out this regional approach ... to design something to begin to address that immediate need and connect to more intermediate-level services beyond just providing food,†she said.
Upon discharge, patients in need will be offered enough bags of items such as pasta, rice, beans, vegetables, shelf-stable milk and cereal to provide meals for two days for their entire household.
The ºüÀêÊÓƵ Area Foodbank will also call families once they are home to connect them to food pantries nearby and sign them up for longer-term assistance programs they may qualify for such as Medicaid or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.
“What we are really hoping to do, in partnership with the Foodbank, is to try to design a model that is a little deeper than just a one-time assistance,†Bradshaw said.
Bradshaw said the idea for the program grew from a small group of employees at SSM Health DePaul Hospital in Bridgeton, who in 2021 began voluntarily storing food to give to patients they knew were struggling.
The employees worked with the Foodbank, helping about 20 to 30 families a month. The standardized screening, however, showed that about 200 families a month at DePaul reported experiencing food insecurity.
“We wanted to make this bigger to see if we can make an impact on a larger scale in a more measurable way,†Bradshaw said.
The program is just the start, she said, of discovering ways the health system can partner community organizations in order to improve patients’ well-being.
“The research is showing that if you really want to move the needle on health disparities and improve outcomes, the social determinants of health have to be addressed,†Bradshaw said.
Rachel Jones, innovation and programs manager for the ºüÀêÊÓƵ Area Foodbank, said more and more food banks nationwide are partnering with local hospitals as a way to address health outcomes.
“Not only are we helping and reaching more neighbors, but then we’re able to connect food and medicine together and really start to look at what does food do,†Jones said. “It does more than just meeting that immediate need, it goes beyond that.â€