Anchor Cohort teams are place-based teams made up of health care institutions taking a whole-of-hospital or health authority approach to working with their communities to experiment with opportunities around food as an upstream determinant of health.
LONDON: St. Joseph's Health Care London & ReForest London
Food services in health care can have a big environmental footprint, but the team from St. Joseph's Health Care London and ReForest London sees potential for food to be part of the solution. Instead of being limited by traditional criteria such as cost, clinical requirements, and operational parameters, this team explored how to integrate more sustainable practices such as local procurement, preparation on site, and reducing and repurposing food overages. They also strive to increasingly implement a holistic perspective, looking at how food is medicine and the land is a stakeholder. Their vision is nothing short of providing food which "nourishes patients, body, mind, and spirit."
According to this team, "COVID-19 allowed us to re-examine our assumptions about patient perspectives surrounding interest in choice and preference and its impact on our model of care, including levels of food waste." With a mandate from Lori Higgs, Vice President Clinical Support & Chief Financial Officer of St. Joseph's Health Care London, this team is part of St. Joseph’s commitment to innovate and "to be active partners in building regional coalitions for health equity in a compassionate and kind way, with a goal of closing gaps in care."
Potential reach:
Working in a large urban health centre with 1,052 acute and long-term health beds across 5 sites, and serving a population of ~9 million residents, innovations from the London team have the potential to be scaled across the city. This team also brought together executive support and partnerships that can influence policy change to support reducing food waste, implementing gardens, and using values-based procurement.
The London team worked on:
Read the final London here.
Offering a room service style option for meal selection to decrease food waste and improve customer service
Increasing the purchase of local ingredients
Piloting a garden on hospital grounds to produce vegetables for food services
Implementing composting across all sites
This fits into the following Food for Health Levers from Nourish:
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• Michelle Stranges, Systems Analyst, St. Joseph’s Health Care London
• Deana D'Ambrosio, Coordinator of Food and Nutrition Services, St. Joseph’s Health Care London
• Lindsay Botnick, Director of Food and Nutrition Services, St. Joseph’s Health Care London
• Barb Adams, Coordinator of Food and Nutrition Services, St. Joseph’s Health Care London
• Lori Higgs, Vice President Clinical Support and CFO, St. Joseph’s Health Care London
• Erika Odegaard, Automation & Business Specialist, St. Joseph’s Health Care London
• Madison Grech, Systems Analyst, St. Joseph’s Health Care London
• Will Fraser, Food Service Specialist (Supervisor), St. Joseph’s Health Care London
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• Shaquille Sealy, Westminster Ponds Centre & Signal Boost Initiative Coordinator, ReForest London
• Jeremy Horrell, Co-Founder and President of the Board, Urban Roots London
• Richie Bloomfield, Co-Founder and Secretary of the Board, Urban Roots London
• Ben Wilcox, Director of Farm Operations, Urban Roots London
