Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Despite food being an important determinant of health, it is often overlooked as a form of medicine in healthcare. Thus, hospital food services often fall short of providing appealing and nutritious offerings, causing malnutrition and worse outcomes for patients. Transforming the provision of hospital food to improve patient care could also have important social and environmental benefits. Offering more culturally-diverse options would provide more culturally safe care, while providing less environmentally damaging foods would help decrease the healthcare footprint. Reimagining hospital food provides an opportunity for healthcare to reflect societal and environmental priorities, addressing several complex challenges simultaneously. After characterizing the existing strengths and limitations of the meals presently served, we will conduct a comparative study between the current menu for hospitalized patients and a new menu we will develop based on the feedback obtained combined with the latest evidence on healthy diets for people and planet. Both menus will be evaluated according to patient satisfaction, nutrition, and the environmental impact of the food served and wasted. We will use these results to develop a Canadian guide to healthy and sustainable hospital food, which will enable other hospitals to adopt a similar model. We will collaborate with two Canadian partners, Nourish Leadership and CASCADES, and workshop the content with Canadian leaders in hospital food. The guide will comprise different types of media to increase accessibility to a wide audience, including healthcare leadership, policy-makers, healthcare providers, and food services operators. These projects will not only generate new evidence about the role that food plays as a medicine for hospitalized patients, but accelerate the adoption of best practices across the country, improving the care of patients and the planet.