On October 14, Fresh Advantage’s Managing Director Marydale DeBor, partner Chef Anne Gallagher, and Fresh Advantage affiliate nutritionist Francine Blinten enjoyed “Tea” (a longstanding Yale tradition) with the next crop of eager healthy-food champions on campus at Pierson College. This Fresh Advantage trio was delighted to be the first special guests in the Yale Sustainable Food Program’s 2015–16 speaker series “Women of Food.” The afternoon’s theme was “Women Addressing Food in Healthcare.”
As they strive to prove they are benefiting communities under the Affordable Care Act, nonprofit hospitals may become the latest battleground between fast-food purveyors and advocates of healthy—and preferably locally produced—cuisine.
“I am looking for opportunities for you to be the doctors to the world,” said Marydale DeBor, a former Connecticut hospital executive, at the convention for the National Farmers Union last month in Springfield, Mass.
Hospitals have long been a culinary joke, serving unappetizing food of questionable nutritional value to patients while selling fast food that is even more questionable in their cafeterias. Medical-school critics have chastised physicians for prescribing to patients costly drugs to deal with the effects of diseases that arise from bad diets and lack of exercise rather than feeding them healthy food and teaching them to eat better when they leave the hospital.
For the first time in its 111 year history the National Farmers Union will hold its convention in New England and Fresh Advantage’s Marydale DeBor is pleased attend as a member of the New England Farmers Union board of directors and delegate to the national convention.
Marydale will present at a breakout session called “Scaling up to Meet Demand” which will look at how farmers can grow to meet the demand for local foods by expanding and by working with fellow family farmers through cooperatives and other organizations.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will compel hospitals to promote population health in the communities they serve. Practicing prevention and keeping the general population served healthy will be a necessity as new payment models are adopted by third-party payers and pressure increases to control per capita costs. In addition, specific mandates tied to reimbursement include reducing patient re-admissions within 30 days of discharge.
PPACA also affects health-care sector employers: incentives exist within the new law for wellness programs that can keep an institution’s workforce healthier and more productive while reducing costs.