Charitable food & health care industry partnership efforts: An evaluation of collaborative food is medicine programs

BACKGROUND: Food Is Medicine (FIM) interventions are on the rise nationally to address high rates of diet-related chronic disease. As a result, partnerships between the charitable food and health care sectors are emerging to support food access needs among food insecure patients managing chronic disease. 

OBJECTIVE: Evaluating FIM programming partnerships between a midwestern regional food bank and its health care partners examining program components and partnership satisfaction. 

DESIGN: Cross-sectional research design via an electronic survey among charitable food and health care partners engaged in FiM programming. 

SETTING: A large midwestern regional food back and their health care partners. 

PARTICIPANTS: include both charitable food and health care staff involved in collaborative FIM interventions. 

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Program components of collaborative FIM programs, collaborator satisfaction, differences in satisfaction between the 2 stakeholder groups (charitable food and health care partners). 

RESULTS: The study included 23 participants (health care [n = 11], charitable food [n = 12]). Majority of FIM programs were on-site pantries (62%) or pre-prepared food boxes (38%). When combined, both stakeholder groups demonstrated a relatively high level of partnership satisfaction with a score of 3.96 out of 5. Charitable food partners had a statistically significantly higher rate of agreement ( = 4.00) that the partnership contributed to their ability to achieve higher funding compared to the health care group ( = 3.00). 

CONCLUSIONS: This study begins to explore a potential evaluation tool for multi-sector FIM partnerships. More research is needed to understand how these partnerships are evolving in practice and how to effectively evaluate them.