UF Health Jacksonville helps Urban Health Alliance with food pharmacy
A terrible car accident in 2019 left Preston Bookman unable to work, impacting his finances and mobility. For the last two years, his unemployment has made accessing healthy food in the Northside of Jacksonville difficult. This, among other factors, has led to health issues that didn’t seem to have solutions.
Until he went to see a nutritionist at UF Health Jacksonville. The nonprofit hospital introduced him to a brand new program that opened up at the beginning of June called the Urban Health Alliance Social Services Hub and Food Pharmacy.
The Food Pharmacy operates like any other pantry, except users are limited and need a prescription from a healthcare provider at the hospital to enter. Once inside, a staff member looks at their medical history and any dietary restrictions and helps them pick out the food they need for their household.
Bookman says it’s exactly what he needed to be able to have the healthy lifestyle he’s struggled to maintain while growing up in Jacksonville. He particularly enjoys the corn and potatoes he’s able to take home and cook.
“Sometimes you go to the store and sometimes you might not see what you need because it’s not there or readily available and going [to the Food Pharmacy], I find exactly what I need to make sure that I’m eating healthy,” Bookman told the Times-Union.
Bookman, 50, is one of 96 people the Urban Health Alliance’s Food Pharmacy is currently supplying with produce and canned goods. Partner organizations, like Feeding Northeast Florida, help stock the shelves.
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The program is the first of its kind in the county, designed to help the most underserved people in Duval. After this group of 96 have had access to the Food Pharmacy for six months, a new group will be cycled through.
The Food Pharmacy is just one part of UF Health Jacksonville’s push to help patients at a more systemic level. The doctors and staff already see some of the area’s most underserved populations. It’s the only hospital in the region that takes Shands Cards, for example, which allow holders to receive care at the hospital for free or for a small copayment.
On TuesdayJuly 6 the Social Services Hub also opened as part of the Urban Health Alliance. The goal is to serve hundreds of people in an initiative that healthcare providers hope will help their patients live healthier outside of the hospital’s walls.
Good health begins at home
About 80 percent of a person’s health happens outside of a clinic, said Dr. Ross Jones, M.D., medical director of the Total Care Clinic and of community health at UF Health Jacksonville. He and his staff recognized that more needed to be done to get to the root issues of peoples’ struggles.
An integral part of that is the Food Pharmacy, which is “tied into” his patients’ clinical diagnosis. The other half is the Social Services Hub, which prepares people to take better advantage of organizations the hospital typically refers patients to, like an employment center, United Way or the Florida State College at Jacksonville’s GED course.
“We’re tired of looking at the data and the data saying the same thing every time,” said Ann-Marie Knight, vice president for Community Engagement and Chief Diversity Officer at UF Health Jacksonville. “While Dr. Jones and his colleagues have been treating the same patients, telling them that they need to eat right, he knows darn well they don’t have access to a grocery store ….Then the rest of us with all the reports are saying, ‘OK, the work that we’re doing is great and is admirable, but we have to find a way to get to the root of the situation.’”
While the Food Pharmacy will allow its clients to have the bandwidth to think about other things besides where the next meal will come from, the Social Services Hub is designed to build patients’ resiliency and improve mental and emotional health.
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This will include programs from yoga and meditation classes to three-day orientations developed to help people self-reflect and build resiliency, all held on the Hub’s own floor in the hospital’s Total Care Clinic, complete with a welcome desk and walls covered in photographs taken by local artist Malcolm Jackson.
Meeting rooms large and small are set up with computers and TVs and sometimes just comfortable couches, ready for patients to sit in-person with outside agencies or for tele-health sessions where clients or healthcare and service providers can connect with each other from anywhere in the county.
“We are creating an orientation model for this space because simply asking Dr. Jones to connect you with a resource, it’s good. It’s a step. But you may be dealing with what I call baggage,” Knight said. “The idea is the more resiliency classes you take, we’re confident it’ll build your confidence and you’ll be more prepared than now to have a conversation with Family Foundation or United Way, whomever the agency is. Our goal is by the time we hand you off to that agency, you’re ready.”
Funding from the community, for the community
Running both operations as well as continuing to connect patients with outside organizations is a sizable job, and will cost around $300,000 a year, Knight guesses.
Florida Blue funded the entirety of the Food Pharmacy while another local company, which wished to remain anonymous, paid for the construction and build-out of the Social Services Hub and the still-unfinished room that will host the yoga and other large-group classes. The rest of the money will come from donations by the public and city coffers.
“The money is key because we truly rely on philanthropic investment,” Knight said, adding that it’s all part of being the only “safety net” hospital in the region that serves around 5,000 uninsured, low-income patients.
As a physician, Jones sees the necessity of improving food access and building patients up mentally as well as physically as a necessary part of overall health. But it’s still not the full picture. Underlying most problems is poverty, underfunded schools, food deserts and “historic underinvestment,” he says.
Black communities are particularly hurt by the disparities. In Duval County, Black residents have the most severe health risk factors, health outcomes and shortest life expectancy of all population groups, according to a new report on health disparities from 904Ward.
“It’s all these issues going ahead, so I think it’s such a broad thing that we need to tackle. But I think the first thing is really looking at poverty and how we reduce those racial and ethnic gaps in wealth,” Jones said. “When you have all these unmet social needs, you’re just trying to survive.”
