Details

Purpose: This symposium will bring lessons and learnings from multiple international contexts to provide insight into strategies and success factors to transition towards healthy and sustainable food environments in hospitals and other health care settings while considering needs, opportunities, benefits and challenges from patient/client, stakeholder and nationwide policy perspectives. 

Rationale: Health care settings should offer nutritious foods to benefit patients/clients health and recovery. These settings should also fulfil an exemplary role for healthy and sustainable living and support employees and visitors to make healthy choices. However, in many countries hospitals and health care settings are lagging. In this symposium we present international examples of actions and strategies (guidance implementation, food procurement, national polices, systems approach) aimed at improving food environments in hospitals and other health care settings. These studies contribute valuable insight on how food environments can be effectively improved across varied contexts in large and complex health systems to promote health and sustainability. 

Objectives: To 1) present research from Denmark to provide guidance and evaluate implementation of healthy and more sustainable diets in nursing homes 2) show the outcomes of a group model building approach where systemic factors were identified that shape the food environment in health care organizations for patients/clients, visitors and staff in the Netherlands 3) present the outcomes of a mixed methods evaluation of a state-wide healthy food retail hospital policy in Australia. We will reflect on the challenges and opportunities for health care settings to facilitate change towards healthy and sustainable food environments and facilitate an interactive discussion with the audience.   

Summary: This symposium will combine learnings from real-life health care settings in four countries (Australia, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands), including insights from different perspectives/level (patient/client, stakeholder, policy) and from exploration to implementation (needs, challenges, opportunities), to see what is needed to change towards more healthy and sustainable food environments.  

Format: The chair (S Rapo) will introduce the symposium (10minutes), by giving the background for the symposium and challenges experienced by health care organizations. M Nordman, L Cranney and J Wierda will present their research highlighting the purpose, methods used, results and conclusions (15minutes each). S Rapo (discussant) will highlight opportunities for change and facilitate an interactive discussion between presenters and attendees (20minutes). 

Interaction: Three propositions that are of interest to the topic and the audience will be formed to guide a discussion. Interactive presentation software will facilitate audience interaction. 

Speaker