Nourishing the Future of Food in Health Care: A Pan-Canadian Policy Scan 2018

Source: Nourish
Date: 2018

Nourish conducted a pan-Canadian scan and create an inventory of existing health, agriculture and procurement policies that guide food in health care settings in order to better identify opportunities for policy innovation that can help shift hospitals and other care centres toward more healthy, delicious, local, sustainable and cultural food. This report aims to highlight policy gaps and opportunities before us.

Download: Pages [Best for printing]; Spreads [Best for online reading]

Health and Food Ethics

Source: AMA Journal of Ethics
Date: October 2018

Gut microbes matter clinically, so diets based on food availability in different markets matter ethically. But that's just one reason to care about food in health care ethics. Providing safe, nutritious, and environmentally sustainable food to all is a great challenge. Physicians in some US cities have been writing prescriptions for patients to obtain fresh produce through healthy food outreach programs. Clinical encounters, however, cannot fully reverse negative health effects of low-quality diets. If the global community cannot find solutions to address food quality and access, costs will be high. This issue investigates some of the compelling ethical issues at stake with food and health.

Nourish Developmental Evaluation: Early Insights

Source: Nourish
Year: 2018

The developmental evaluation explores four inter-related aspects of the Nourish initiative: 1) Innovator Program; 2) Projects; 3) Network & Narrative and 4) Policy. The intent of this evaluation is to help the program staff, lead partners and project advisors examine how the initiative has started to take shape, adjust strategies, and assess early signs of progress towards longer-term objectives.

Link to download report.

Wasan Report 2018: Seeing Environmental Nutrition in Health Care in New Ways

Source: Nourish
Year: 2018

The overlap of health care and food systems is multifaceted. In 2018 Nourish convened 22 leaders from across healthcare, government, food systems and philanthropy together for a four day retreat on Wasan Island in order to explore the opportunities around environmental nutrition in health care. Environmental nutrition (2014), a concept coined by Health Care Without Harm, reframes healthy food as contributing beyond individual well-being towards a collective social responsibility for creating healthy communities and a sustainable food system. Read a blog about the retreat for an overview, or go into detail with the full report.

Webinar: Room Service

Source: Nourish
Year: 2018
Four Nourish Innovators who have successfully implemented room service at their site(s) share why they decided on a room service model, how they secured stakeholder buy-in and how they overcame obstacles in their way.

Featuring Danielle Barriault (registered dietitian, Alberta Health Services).

Webinar: Reframing Healthy Food in Health Care

Source: Nourish
Year: 2018
Presenters: Diane Imrie, Director of Nutrition, University of Vermont; Joshna Maharaj, Chef, Activist; Dr Janice Sorensen, Professor, Langara College

The question of what qualifies as “healthy” food is highly contested in health care and beyond. This conversation is alive and well in our leadership cohort, and we want to engage it publicly. At the Reframing Healthy Food in Heath Care webinar we brought together diverse perspectives from three thought-leaders to explore how hospitals and health care facilities can lead the charge in expanding the definition of healthy food, to better serve people, patients, and the planet.

Click for webinar slides.

Webinar: Reframing health food in health care

Date: August 23, 2018

What makes food healthy, for whom, and who decides?

Featuring Diane Imrie (Director of Nutrition, University of Vermont), Joshna Maharaj (Chef and activist), Dr. Janice Sorensen (Professor, Langara College), Hayley Lapalme, and Jennifer Reynolds.

Webinar: Building Capacity for Traditional & Country Food Programs

Source: Nourish
Year: 2018
The slide deck from the Traditional Food Program webinar organized by the Indigenous Foodways team in February 2018. It captures the learnings from the discovery phase of the project and key findings from research.

Anchor Institutions

Source: Mowatt Centre & Atkinson Foundation
Year: 2015

Unlike many corporations that come and go from communities, anchor institutions are public and nonprofit institutions that stay put. This report explores how we can spend our resources and procure services in ways that create opportunities for people who live on the economic margins.

Maximizing the Capacities of Advanced Education Institutions to Build Social Infrastructure for Canadian Communities

Source: RECODE initiative and Simon Fraser University
Year: 2017

A discussion paper exploring how higher education institutions can harness and leverage their assets (financial, physical, relational, research and education) to build social infrastructure that will positively impact communities and advance societal well-being.

Inclusive, Local Sourcing: Purchasing for People and Place

Source: Democracy Collaborative
Year: 2016

This toolkit on local and diverse purchasing showcases examples of how hospitals and health systems are reevaluating their roles as their community’s largest purchasers, understanding that a thriving local economy is fundamental to a healthy community.

The Future of Health is Local: A Field Guide for Health Sector Leadership

Source: BALLE
Year: 2016

This field guide, produced by The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) in partnership with Kaiser Permanente, connects the dots between the social determinants of health and the framework of strategies that both BALLE and MIT's Presencing Institute have identified as the path forward in building thriving local economies.

Embracing an Anchor Mission: ProMedica’s All-In Strategy

Source: HealthCare Anchor Network
Year: 2018

This report offers an in-depth look at how the Toledo, Ohio based health system aligned its institutional operations and clinical practice to better tackle the social determinants of health.

Delivering Community Benefit: Healthy Food Playbook

Source: Health Care Without Harm
Year: 2018
Learn from a website brimming with resources to accelerate best practices to promote healthy food access and healthier food systems.

Recommendations on Country/Traditional Food from the Northern Policy Hackathon

Source: Gordon Foundation
Year: 2018
On 25–26 October 2017, The Gordon Foundation convened their first Northern Policy Hackathon (NPH) in Nain, Nunatsiavut. The NPH brought together northerners from across the three territories and Inuit Nunangat, to develop innovative policy recommendations on country/traditional food. Participants were from a wide array of backgrounds, including hunters, elders, nutritionists, as well as representatives from government, and the not-profit sector. These are the recommendations from that event.

Serving up Local: Manual for Increasing Local Foods in Long-Term Care

Source: Golden Horseshoe Food & Farming Alliance
Year: 2018
This manual is a collection of good practices resulting from the experience of nine long-term care (LTC) homes in three regions in the Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario as part of the Serving Up Local project from May 2016 to January 2018. It is designed to provide resources and steps that can be put into practice to initiate and grow institutional local food procurement programs by long-term care and other food service and procurement staff throughout the MASH (Municipalities, Academics, School Boards and Hospitals) in Ontario.

Nourish Infographic: Opportunities for Food in Health Care

Source: Nourish
Year: 2018
Nourish and its collaborators have launched new infographic, The Opportunities for Food in Health Care, to illustrate how food choices can enhance the patient experience, support organizational results and efficiencies, and contribute to community wellbeing.

Webinar: Systems mapping

Source: Nourish
Year: 2017
Presenters: Melanie Goodchild, Turtle Island Institute; Jen Reynolds, Food Secure Canada; Hayley Lapalme, Nourish; Beth Hunter, McConnell Foundation

This discussion-based webinar will explore the potential of systems mapping as a tool to understand systems and to design better interventions. We will introduce the basics of beginning to draw your own systems maps. The Nourish team will share the maps drawn to interpret the (dis)connection between food and health/care, and will explore the insights and opportunities that emerged from those maps. Participants will be invited to respond to the maps and discuss patterns they observe in their work.

For some background, Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems: A Primer is a wonderful resource - and we just discovered, is available online! If you want to cut to the chase, Chapter 6: Leverage Points (p.145) packs a good punch and is one of the most practical chapters.

Learning Objectives

• Discuss the potential of systems mapping as a tool to understand systems and to design better interventions.

• Introduce some basic concepts of systems thinking and systems mapping. (Note: Done well, systems mapping is hard! This will be an introduction.)

• Apply the concepts of mapping to an existing map produced by the Nourish team.

• Encourage participants to engage with the maps by sharing insights, surfacing assumptions, and contributing new interpretations.

Wasan Report 2017: Food is fundamental to health and healing

For four days from Thursday, September 7th to Sunday, September 10, 19 leaders from across healthcare, government and food sectors convened together on Wasan Island in order to explore the role of food in healthcare in Canada. The core belief of the group was that food is fundamental to health and healing, but is currently undervalued within the healthcare system. Through systems mapping, the group explored the dynamics of the current healthcare system and prototyped actionable opportunities for a future of food in health care that nourishes patients, communities and the environment.

Read the summary report here.

Webinar: Innovator Collaborative Projects Public Kickoff

Source: Nourish
Year: 2017
Are you interested by the role that better food can play in delivering better health care? The Nourish leadership program has kicked off 5 collaborative projects and is looking for your engagement.

Each team approaches a different dimension of the disconnect between food in health care, for example: better understanding the patient experience of food in health, and addressing barriers to sustainable, local, and traditional food that supports health and healing. Specifically, their work relates to:

• Increasing the sector's ability to deliver Traditional & Country Food Programs for Indigenous patients and residents

• Developing a Sustainable Menu Guide to help the sector decrease its ecological impact and support social and economic wellbeing

• Creating a more enabling policy environment for a Food is Health approach in health care

• Developing National RFP Models for values-based healthcare food purchasing

• Researching strategies for benchmarking National Patient Satisfaction/Experience with Food Services

We invite you to join the Nourish cohort to learn about the suite of national, collaborative projects they have been developing to transform how we think about food in care. During the webinar, each project team defines the problem they are tackling and how they plan to approach it. Participants are invited to respond to a call to action to engage with the projects.