A $50,000 grant is helping SickKids Hospital improve the quality of the most basic medicine they dispense—food.
The grant, awarded to SickKids by the Government of Ontario-funded
Greenbelt Fund, is being used to kickstart a menu overhaul based on Ontario-grown nutritious foods.
Leading the menu revamp is Toronto chef Joshna Maharaj, an outspoken advocate for healthier—and more delicious—hospital meals. Maharaj gained fame in 2011 for her work on another Greenbelt Fund initiative, overhauling the Scarborough Hospital's patient menu (based in large part on the success of the Scarbourough Hospital project the
Toronto Star named Maharaj one of their 12 to watch in 2012).
With this grant, SickKids joins a group of more than 20 Ontario healthcare centres, including Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital, the Queensway Carleton Hospital and the Scarborough Hospital that have received funding of some kind from the Greenbelt Fund. The fund, the sister organization of the
Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, is working to increase the amount of locally sourced food in the province's public sector institutions. The Greenbelt Fund has supported 38 projects to date, many of them hospitals and long-term care facilities.
"Every sector has its own challenges and every sector sees [the fund's mandate] as an opportunity to address something," says Greenbelt Fund program manager Franco Naccarato. "A lot of hospitals are looking at ways to increase the quality, ways to decrease waste, and to improve customer satisfaction and health. And paying attention to food is a really important step in solving those problems."
That's why, in addition to providing funds to healthcare institutions, the Greenbelt Fund is also creating a network of Ontario hospitals that can share their collective knowledge.
"When [the hospitals] we work with face challenges or issues, they can always bring them to us. And very often we help them by introducing them to other grantees," says Naccarato. "You'll often get two hospitals trying to answer the exact same question and we'll say, 'Why don't you ask that grantee and ask them how they're dealing with it?' So we're making connection amongst hospitals and also with other players in the local food scene too."
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Franco Naccarato, Program Manager, Greenbelt Fund