medstar primary care :: Article CreatorFRESHFARM And MedStar Georgetown University Hospital Partner To Combat Child Food Insecurity With New Produce Rx Program
MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and FRESHFARM, a local nonprofit that connects communities with farmers markets, launched a "Food is Medicine" program in August 2024 to empower families experiencing food insecurity, which is insufficient food or nutrition to fuel a healthy, active lifestyle.
One in seven children face hunger in Washington, D.C., despite federal programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides monthly funds to low-income families for groceries. To address this systemic issue, MedStar and FRESHFARM will provide families with Produce Rx cards, which function like debit cards that are loaded with money for the purchase of fresh produce.
The program allows MedStar pediatric patients' families to purchase fresh produce of their choice at over 50 participating farmers markets, according to Caron Gremont, director of food system innovation and resiliency at FRESHFARM.
"We are hoping to support families struggling with food security and who have a difficult time accessing and affording healthy, local produce," Gremont told The Hoya.
The pilot program will begin with 30 to 50 families experiencing food insecurity who were identified through pediatric patient visits at the Kids Mobile Medical Clinic at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital.
Dr. Janine A. Rethy, medical director of the Kids Mobile Medical Clinic at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, shared that the clinic has been routinely screening for food insecurity as a part of primary care visits for the last six years. These screenings have revealed that 25% to 30% of the clinic's patients experience food insecurity.
"Including questions on food insecurity as a part of that visit is important because it's tied to our role as healthcare providers to take a holistic approach to how we take care of children and their family," Rethy told The Hoya.
This screening enables pediatricians to enroll eligible food-insecure families in federal programs like SNAP, as well as local programs like the FRESHFARM and MedStar collaboration. After families are identified and enrolled by MedStar Georgetown, they are given a Produce Rx card with a unique code, which FRESHFARM then activates.
"Families are then immediately able to use the cards at farmers markets in the DMV," Gremont said. "We know transportation may be a barrier, but we hope that, with the long list of participating farmers markets, families can find a market near where they live, work and have children enrolled in school or early child care."
ILLUSTRATION BY: LAUREN TAO/The HoyaFRESHFARM, a local nonprofit, is partnering with MedStar Georgetown University Hospital to provide pediatric patients' families with Produce Rx cards, which can be used to buy fresh produce at fifty participating farmers' markets.
While the program currently relies on philanthropic donations from The J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation, which supports nonprofit organizations that improve the lives of D.C. Residents, if it proves successful in increasing the resiliency of food insecure families, the plan is to have a larger clinic, MedStar Georgetown Pediatrics, also adopt the program and develop a sustainable finance model, according to Rethy.
"We have a partnership with the McCourt School of Public Policy to see if we can build a healthcare finance model that can be replicable and scalable in other practices and won't need to rely on philanthropic funding for sustainability," Rethy said.
To assess the impact of the program in addressing the social determinants of health, or the environmental conditions that affect health outcomes, FRESHFARM and MedStar Georgetown will measure how Produce Rx card usage correlates with factors such as vaccination rates, emergency room visits and familial wellbeing.
Anna Johnson, an associate professor of psychology who conducts research exploring the predictors of food insecurity and their impact on low-income households with children, believes tracking such health outcomes is critical due to the well-studied negative effects of food insecurity on children.
"Kids directly feel the effects of food insecurity, whether it's through hunger or being cranky or poor nutrition, and it can affect brain development, since the fatty parts of the brain called glial cells that help transmit information from neuron to neuron suffer when you don't have sufficient nutrition," Johnson told The Hoya.
Apart from the direct impacts of hunger and poor nutrition, parental stress and mental health issues resulting from food insecurity also indirectly influence child health, according to Johnson.
"Parents are stressed out because they can't provide nutritious food and will often go without food in order to feed their kids, and hungry parents are impatient, frustrated and lack sensitivity, which then affects the kids," Johnson said.
Since food insecurity is closely linked to a family's socioeconomic status, another metric Rethy plans to assess after the pilot program is familial financial health.
"Having cash access to pay for healthy fruits and vegetables can help them be more stable financially and takes away a little bit of that financial worry, which can also improve health outcomes for the child and the family," Rethy said.
Johnson underscored policies that can be implemented to further alleviate food insecurity, such as removing rigid guidelines that make enrollment conditional on work status, from public food assistance programs like SNAP, and expanding school-based food programs to provide meals for children over weekends.
"Food insecurity is a solvable problem, and poverty is a policy choice, so there's no reason for children to be in poverty or to be food insecure in this country except that we don't invest enough in programs that would eliminate those problems," Johnson said.
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