“Hospital Food” Given a New Meaning

Cornucopia’s Take: This Pennsylvania hospital provides education on eating and producing food to its patients. Here’s to more of this in the New Year!

In One of the Nation’s Unhealthiest Places, This Hospital Prescribes Fresh Food From Its Own Farm
YES! Magazine
by Liza Bayless

In an industry usually focused on medicine and procedures, a Philadelphia-area hospital decided what its patients needed was a farm and advice about food.

Five years ago, when Lankenau Medical Center was confronted with evidence that it was serving the unhealthiest county in Pennsylvania, the hospital decided to embrace the findings with an unconventional approach: building a half-acre organic farm on its campus to provide fresh produce to patients.

The teaching and research hospital just outside Philadelphia was in the midst of its own patient health needs assessment in 2011 when the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released findings about health outcomes in Pennsylvania counties. Lankenau is officially located within Montgomery County, one of the state’s healthiest, taking into account factors including obesity rates and access to reliable sources of food. But the campus is adjacent to and receives many patients from Philadelphia County, ranked the least healthy of all 67 counties.

“That was really telling because it showed that we were serving a really diverse patient population,” says Chinwe Onyekere, associate administrator at Lankenau, of the study’s revelations. The findings showed that the hospital’s patients had widely varying access to healthy food and nutritional knowledge.

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