The accompanying press release can be found here.
Health-related social needs, such as access to secure food, housing, and employment, are increasingly recognized as fundamental contributors to the health and well-being of communities. While systemic inadequacies to food access predated the COVID-19 pandemic, the magnitude of need has been exacerbated. Health care organizations are more broadly investing in efforts to address unmet social needs, including food insecurity, to improve the health and well-being of individuals and communities.
United Hospital Fund and Boston Consulting Group partnered in 2021 to quantify the health impact of food insecurity on New Yorkers and review potential solutions to alleviate the burden on families and individuals.
This analysis is broken into three parts. The first part measures the scale of food insecurity in New York. Part 2 assesses the role that the health care system plays in addressing food insecurity, including a financial impact analysis of food insecurity on health. Part 3 reviews potential policy and programmatic interventions that health care stakeholders could take to reduce New Yorkers’ food insecurity. Food insecurity cannot be solved by health care organizations alone, especially as some of the root causes relate to long-standing inequitable policies and practices, but their engagement and collaboration is critical to helping to alleviate the immediate need for New Yorkers.
Read a related commentary here. Read the press release here.
