August 25, 2022

Addressing Food Insecurity with Leadership

ANALYSIS  |  BY MELANIE BLACKMAN  |  

POSTED AUGUST 25, 2022

Read on Health Leaders Media

Catholic Health’s CEO shares how the Long Island, New York health system is tackling the community’s access to good, healthy food.

More than 250,000 people living in New York’s Nassau and Suffolk Counties are food insecure. That’s 25% of all the adults that live on Long Island, according to Long Island Cares.

Catholic Health, an integrated health system that serves around 25% of Long Island’s population, is aiming to address that challenge.

Catholic Health has six hospitals, numerous ambulatory care facilities and clinics, and a home care service that have a finger on the pulse of its patients’ social determinants of health (SDOH), including food access, which affects communities all over the country.

“We’ve seen here in the New York/Long Island market that, because of various changes going on post-COVID, access to healthy food is a challenge, and inflationary pressures have made it difficult for so many families to get access to food,” Catholic Health president and CEO Patrick M. O’Shaughnessy, DO, MBA, told HealthLeaders.


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According to Long Island Cares, 79,000 children on Long Island are food insecure. And when schools closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, children who relied on school-sponsored and supplied meals were affected.

“Those were their only source of meals,” O’Shaughnessy said. “In the United States alone, 38 million people—12 million children—are food insecure. That’s a statistic we have to commit to and improve … Making sure that folks are aware that there is help out there, that there is a mechanism, and to seek assistance if they are food insecure is important.”

THE CHALLENGES

Food insecurity has been exacerbated by the pandemic, inflation, an overall increase in the cost of living, and labor workforce issues, he said.

“The impact of the labor workforce issues, we’re still feeling this in the healthcare sector, certainly, but around the country, it disrupted supply chains, farming, bringing fresh food to the table, and distribution,” O’Shaughnessy said. “All these things further accelerated the problem.”

He added, “I have every bit of that confidence that it’s going to get better, and the whole point of why we’re talking today is to bring awareness to food insecurity. Too many people downplay the importance of food’s impact on your overall health and wellness; you truly are what you eat.”

Another challenge is the cost of food, and how inexpensive foods are leading to an increase in chronic diseases.

“It’s one of the first times in the history of humankind that we see the most calorically dense and nutritionally depleted foods,” he said. “They’re the cheapest and most available, yet those that are more nutritionally dense and healthy for you are expensive and becoming harder and harder to buy.”

“Nationally, you see incidents of cardio and cerebral vascular disease, cancer, and diabetes is increasing,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Food plays a major role in all of this, and we as healthcare leaders and healthcare providers [need to] address the fact that food plays a big piece into our overall health and wellness and focus our interactions to be equally focused on disease prevention and health and wellness.”

Those incidents are also affecting the health system’s Long Island communities.

“We see chronic disease incidents rising certainly in Long Island; we see this in terms of rates of diabetes, coronary artery disease, hypertension, hyperlipidemia or high cholesterol [and] stroke. And while we have cutting edge, state-of-the-art treatments to treat people when they develop these diseases, wouldn’t it be great if we could bend the disease curve and get upstream of that, and help people live longer, healthier lives?”

THE SOLUTIONS

Addressing food insecurity and SDOH needs to come from the top, O’Shaughnessy said.

“It’s important for leadership to address these issues and focus on SDOH,” he said. “It starts with leadership.”

O’Shaughnessy says it’s a privilege to lead Catholic Health while the organization launches new disease-based therapies and interventions and an increased focus on effectively screening people for food insecurity in its primary care sites and emergency rooms.

“We built [food insecurity screening] into our electronic health records so that our nurses, social workers, [and] care managers will actually ask [patients] relative questions relative to if they are food insecure and how often has this been an issue for them,” he said.

Screening is also part of emergency room visits.

“When [patients] come into our emergency room we consider it a soft vital sign to ask about food insecurity; meaning how many times in a week or a month did you feel you couldn’t get from paycheck to paycheck and have enough good, healthy food to eat,” he added.

Additionally, Catholic Health, in partnership with Long Island Cares, Catholic Charities, and the Health and Welfare Council of Long Island have launched programs in August to address food insecurity among patients.

“This is where health systems have to partner with community-based organizations,” O’Shaughnessy said.

One of the programs, in partnership with Long Island Cares, provides food insecure emergency room patients with bags of food.

“We call them ‘Go Bags,’ and these are bags of nonperishable food that will be stored in the emergency rooms, and when we identify people at a time of crisis, we’ll immediately give them food,” he said. “We’ll also plug them into a [food security] program.”

Through a partnership with Catholic Charities and the Health and Welfare Council of Long Island, the health system also enrolls food insecure patients into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to ensure they receive ongoing food benefits.

Additionally, the health system has partnered with Island Harvest and Adelphi University nutrition graduate students to build programs that track how the community is doing around food security, he said.

“Our homecare agency is one example of that,” he said. “As people are enrolled in homecare, we can actually go in their home and see what’s in their refrigerator. You can learn a lot about somebody about what’s in their refrigerator or what may not be.”

“We’ve made over 336 food deliveries since the program’s inception just going into some houses alone,” he said.

‘YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE BLINDERS OFF’

O’Shaughnessy’s advice for other hospital and health system executives when it comes to addressing SDOH and food insecurity is to be active and proactive.

“You have to take the blinders off,” he said. “If you’re going to truly bend the disease curve, you have to look at what’s driving disease burden, and food insecurity plays a major role in that.”

Food insecurity causes an increased risk of chronic conditions (40% or more), which is where the most money is spent in healthcare, he said. In order to address that, healthcare organizations need to focus on SDOH to improve the health and wellness of its population in a preventative manner.

“It’s not difficult to initiate [food insecurity programs],” he said. “Organizations are quick to want to partner with healthcare systems because they also appreciate and know the interrelation interplay between food insecurity and chronic disease development. They’ll be a great partner for you.”

He also spoke about the importance of screening patients for food insecurity.

“If you don’t screen patients, you’ll never know what’s going on,” he said. “You’ll be surprised to find the number of people that will share that they’re having difficulty with this.”

“Every interaction counts,” he added. “Every family, every person, every child that we’re able to intervene on and help them get access to good food, will certainly lead to a much longer, healthier life.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on August 25, 2022.

“IN THE UNITED STATES ALONE, 38 MILLION PEOPLE—12 MILLION CHILDREN—ARE FOOD INSECURE. THAT’S A STATISTIC WE HAVE TO COMMIT TO AND IMPROVE.”

— PATRICK M. O’SHAUGHNESSY, DO, MBA, PRESIDENT AND CEO, CATHOLIC HEALTH

Melanie Blackman is the strategy editor at HealthLeaders, an HCPro brand.

Photo credit: Catholic Health staff hold “Go Bags,” a new initiative to bring food to food insecure patients in the ER. Photo courtesy of Catholic Health.

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