Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I'm Chris
Olson, and I'm thrilled to be joined today
by doctor Sarah Hohen, chief medical officer at
La Rabida Children's Hospital in Chicago, and Christina
Lindboom, program director of care coordination and social
work at La Rabida. Sarah and Christina, thank
you for joining us today.
Thank you. We're excited to be here.
Excellent. Sarah and Christina, could you please just
take a minute and introduce,
yourselves to our audience and tell us a
bit about your background?
Sure. So I'm Sarah Hohen. I'm the chief
medical officer here at La Revita.
I'm a pediatrician
by training who is board certified in critical
care medicine, hospice and palliative medicine, and Genpeds.
Here at Lara Vida, we have kids with
complex medical needs and a lot of kids
with technology,
and we're really focused on how we can
help our kids live their best lives while
simultaneously
improving our engagement with the community and those
around us.
And I'm Christina Lindboom. I am the program
director for
care coordination and social work here at La
Rabida, both on the inpatient and outpatient side.
I am a licensed clinical social worker for
the last
twenty five years,
and, I have focused my career on acute
hospitalization
and also community mental health in my past.
And our job of my teams is to
focus on the psychosocial,
needs of our families and the social determinants
of health that affect our families on an
everyday basis.
Basis. Excellent. Thank you both for telling us
a bit about yourselves.
We are on the podcast today to talk
about food insecurity in in particular.
So this is something that you both are
very passionate about, correcting in the Chicago area
and hopefully beyond that,
depending on how far your efforts can go.
So,
doctor Hohen, could you tell us a bit
about how Larabita
what address what led the hospital to address
food security, and have you worked with any
helpful models or partners, anything to that effect?
Yeah. For sure. So one of the things
we know is that living in Chicago, we
know that about one in four children have
food insecurity.
We know that on the South Side Of
Chicago and in our,
immediate area
where we're located, it's more like one out
of three children have issues with food insecurity.
I know from when we used to see
patients in clinic and all different times that
if you're interacting with families, a lot of
the times, if people are
not as willing to talk to you or
they're acting shut down or you're really getting
a sense of disengagement
from them,
a lot of times what we found is
that sometimes it's just literally hunger. I mean,
if you think about how you feel if
you skipped breakfast and lunch and people talk
colloquially about the word hangry. Right? Like, you're
hungry and you're angry.
And if you think about families that might
not have enough access to food,
how much just offering them a granola bar
and apple juice can do to improve their
engagement and improve their mood. And so I
think part of it was we were seeing
people,
that were coming in that didn't necessarily wanna
disclose that they don't have access to food
because it's something that's really hard for people
to talk about.
We know,
in our work in the greater community that
there's a lot of food insecurity in the
area.
And so what we did when we wanted
to address this was we modeled this after
the feed first food pantries,
which are a model that was created by
Stacy Lindau, who's a physician at University of
Chicago through the Lindau lab. And they looked
a lot at food deserts in the South
Side Of Chicago and all the different areas.
And so we modeled it on this feed
first pantry,
which is literally having access just it might
start with something like a bookshelf,
having non perishables
that no one has to ask permission,
People have free access to it, and they
can take what they need. So it was
important to us
when we open this up that there's no,
barriers to it. So people can come get
a box of cereal. People can come get
a jar of peanut butter and then take
it home and share with their families. So
we did base our model here at Laravita
in conjunction and in partnership with the Lindell
Lab at University of Chicago, which had the
Feed First Pantry.
Thank you so much, doctor Hillen. So, Christina,
could you give us an idea of the
type of feedback
you've received on the program from patients as
well as from Laura Bida's leadership and staff,
and give us an idea of how long
it's been going on and other effects the
program has had?
Sure.
Our food pantry in the outpatient clinic we
located in the outpatient clinic,
which is a central location for both inpatient
and outpatient families that can have the open
access to the pantry.
We started
it about two years ago,
but really within the last year, we've really
ramped it up and started actually collecting data.
No really identifying information except for a ZIP
code and number of individuals in the household.
And for about the last year, we've served
about 3,500
individuals
that have signed in, and
about 75%
of our families actually sign in on the
sign in sheet.
Feedback from families when we've been stocking the
pantry
have been
fabulous. They
say that it's a lifesaver.
They have acknowledged that this has helped stretch
their food budget.
Most of our families are on the SNAP
program or food stamps,
and they're able to
supplement their
food stamp budget with our the food from
our pantry with our non perishable foods. So
they can focus on getting
more produce and fruits and vegetables and dairy
and meat with their actually SNAP benefits and
the other pantry staples from our food pantry.
Leadership has been very supportive of this, as
we recognize the need. My social work and
care coordination staff love the fact that we
have a small food pantry
for our outpatient and inpatient families that if
we have a family that comes to us
and they're hungry and they need food that
day, we have the means now to provide
that to them. Because a lot of the
food pantries here in Chicago, while there are
numerous of them throughout all the various neighborhoods,
they have very limited days and hours. So
by providing food here, we're able to meet
that immediate need our families have.
3,500 people that you've already helped with this
program sounds like a terrific start, but no
doubt you would like to see it continue
to grow.
So as we look over the next three
to five years,
how do you see the program growing, and
are there similar projects
at the hospital that you would like to
highlight right now?
Definitely. I think one of our goals is
to increase
access. So in addition to the outpatient food
pantry, we've started an inpatient food pantry.
We know that everybody in 2025
is really dealing with skyrocketing
food prices.
We're also looking at,
an employee food pantry, so we have sort
of different avenues for it. I think when
we think about what our goals are, you
heard Christina mention about families trying to save
their money for dairy and protein and fruits
and vegetables.
And I think what we would love to
see in the future is a way
to really provide more of that fresh fruits,
fresh vegetables,
whether or not we'd be able to start
a garden here. But I do think what
we wanna look at over time is how
we can provide people more fresh fruits and
vegetables
and more healthier options in terms
of access to milk and protein and different
things that are super expensive and really hard
for families to come by. And in general
none of the food pantries in the area
the mobile food pantries and things like that
so many of them focus on that Non
perishables and there are so many things you
don't think about right? Like if you go
to a food pantry and you get a
box of macaroni and cheese well, you can't
make that macaroni and cheese unless you have
milk. So giving someone a box of macaroni
and cheese isn't gonna help them if they
don't have the milk to make it with
when they get home. So we really wanna
look at how we can give them more
comprehensive
options that they can use for their whole
family.
And I would say one of the projects
that we have, we partnered with Just Roots.
It's a local urban farm that has two
urban farms here. One on the South Side
Of Chicago has about a half acre farm
within the city limits, and then it also
has another in Stock Village, which is the
South Suburb of Chicago
that has a three acre farm. For the
last four years, we've partnered with them for
what we call our fresh food pharmacy,
and that is able during the growing season
to give our families fresh produce,
fruits and vegetables that are grown locally on
these farms.
So this year, we're able to expand it
to at least 30 families per session.
And over the last three years,
we've served about 535
families with that partnership.
How wonderful would it be if patients and
their families walk into La Rabita and see
a garden where a lot of these foods
are being grown? Hopefully, that it's only a
matter of time. Obviously,
the weather won't allow for certain things to
be grown here, but I'm sure there's a
lot of progress that could be made on
that front. Is is that something you're you're
really trying to focus on in addition to
the other efforts that you're working on?
Oh, absolutely. We have a whole rooftop that
we've looked at for years and said it
would be a beautiful garden. So we're getting
some different quotes and looking at different ways
we can do that. We do benefit with
our partnership with the University of Chicago. They
have some garden on the Top Floor
of their parking lot,
and they've been willing to share some of
their fresh produce with us,
especially in July and August, later in the
summer times. So it's amazing to see how
even just a few small,
garden beds can really produce a lot of
produce for people.
So that is something that we're actively looking
at here, and we've been working with our,
you know, the landscaping team and things like
that to figure out how,
best to do it. But for sure, it's
one of our goals.
Fresh food is really the key because it's
really about how do you help people not
be hungry, but how do you also help
them be healthy.
And we know that when people are on
food stamps and things like that, you're really
trying to get where you can get the
most bulk. Right? So you wanna get the
cheapest food so people aren't hungry,
but the cheapest foods are often the least
healthy food. So we really wanna look at
how this intersection of health and wellness so
we can make sure people
have access to food so they're not hungry,
but they also have access to fresh healthy
foods like fruits and vegetables and dairy products
so they can have health and have a
well balanced diet.
Finally, doctor Hohen and Christina. So what advice
would you give to other leaders or any
other health care systems or colleagues, etcetera,
who want to undertake similar efforts? Certainly, your
program is not the only one out there,
and maybe you can work with each other,
you know, change exchange ideas and things on
that front. And so what advice would you
have for them?
I do think our advice is that if
you build it, they will come. There's a
huge need for programs like this, and we
know that hospitals have a duty
to help their families holistically to make sure
that all their needs can be met. And
we know that working with the Chicago food
depository, there's a lot fewer mobile food pantries
than there used to be. And so we
really wanna encourage people to think about how
they can give their families
nonjudgmental
twenty four seven access
to nonperishable
foods and how you're really looking at what
you're providing
for families to help support them along the
whole continuum of care.
I would also say look at partnering with
your different community organizations.
Get your volunteer services involved.
Almost all health systems have a volunteer services.
Get them involved. Reach out to your community
organizations that already volunteer in other aspects of
the health care system and see if they
would be willing to come in and stop
the pantry or to donate food or to
have a food drive for you. Because the
more community engagement you have around this issue,
the more it can be solved on a
global level.
Sarah, Christina,
best of luck with all the efforts, including
everything you're working on with,
improving
food insecurity, and we cannot thank you enough
for being so generous with your time, your
insights, your passion for this
topic today, and we can't wait to share
them with our audience. And, hopefully, we'll speak
to you both again soon.
Thank you. Thank you very much. We really
appreciate this opportunity, and we're grateful for it.