Charitable Food & Health Care Industry Partnership Efforts: An Evaluation of Collaborative Food Is Medicine Programs

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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).

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.