By Sowmya Krishna, Staff Reporter

Main Line Health recently won the Community Champions Award from the Hospital and Health system Association of Pennsylvania (HAP) for its food insecurity program.

This initiative was directed by Shonalie Roberts, the system director for health equity at Main Line Health, and Joe MacDonald, the process improvement engineer.

The food insecurity program located within Main Line Health’s emergency departments is essentially a way for health professionals to get an idea of when patients are suffering from food insecurity. Food insecurity is measured by assessing whether the patient is ever worried about their food supply and not being able to afford more. When a patient enters the emergency department of a hospital, they usually will go through a screening process, and food insecurity will be assessed through that process.

Once a patient has been diagnosed with food insecurity, they are provided a food bag to deal with any current hunger issues. However, that is not a long term solution.

“Being able to provide long term resources is important,” Roberts said regarding solutions to food insecurity.

To be able to offer more long term solutions, the team collaborated with IT departments in order to technologically locate local food resources for patients such as food pantries that they could access when they do not have access to food.

Main Line Health encompasses five hospitals, and the program was uniquely not launched through these five hospitals at the same time. The program was first launched at the Paoli Hospital.

One of the major problems faced at the Paoli Hospital was the expiration of food. Many patients were not aware of when items perished and thus were not able to utilize the provided food bags. A solution implemented to fix this was making sure the patient was fully aware of when the food expired by placing expiration dates directly on the food bag. Another solution was to donate non-expired foods within expired food bags to ensure that no food was going to waste.

The Paoli Hospital was also a great place to start because they already had a food program located in in-patient units.

“It was a lot less work and a lot less of a hurdle to set up the program in (Paoli Hospital’s) emergency department first,” MacDonald said.

Main Line Health’s efforts allowed it to be one of the twenty hospitals in Pennsylvania recognized by HAP through its 2023 achievement programs.

“We thought that this would be an excellent opportunity for Main Line Health to share some of the work that we were doing in partnership with the community because we don’t do this by ourselves,” Roberts said.

Sowmya Krishna can be reached at [email protected].