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Integrating Food Insecurity Assessment in Medical School Curriculum as an Important Health Indicator
Author(s) -
Uhley Virginia,
Farr A. Celeste
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.30.1_supplement.675.11
Subject(s) - curriculum , health care , general partnership , medical education , context (archaeology) , health promotion , medicine , needs assessment , psychology , environmental health , nursing , public health , business , political science , pedagogy , paleontology , finance , law , biology
Food insecurity is associated with an increase in chronic disease risk and negative health outcomes. Gaining an understanding of how to assess for food insecurity is an important skill for health care professionals to integrate into their clinical practice. Medical students need to have the opportunity to learn how to integrate the assessment of food insecurity within the context of the doctor‐patient relationship and clinical assessment. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act will increase the probability that more individuals at risk for food insecurity will enter the health care system, further emphasizing the need for this important assessment skill. To integrate the assessment of food insecurity into our medical school curriculum, we developed and implemented problem‐based longitudinal clinical patient case scenarios and a lecture based presentation in partnership with our local Health department which identified community health programs that were designed to help address food insecurity into our second year Promotion and Maintenance of Health course. We present here an overview of this innovative curriculum. Medical students were required to review their assigned case scenario and to assess their patient's nutrition risks and identify community health resources that would help support their patient's nutrition and health needs. A review of our medical student's completed case responses indicated that this case‐based approach was successful in allowing our student's the opportunity to integrate food insecurity into a clinical assessment and further they were able to incorporate community resources to help address the social determinants of the health of their assigned patients. We conclude that providing problem‐based longitudinal clinical case scenarios is an effective way to integrate skill based food insecurity and associated social determinants of health assessment into the medical school curriculum.