Article Text
PDF
Abstract
Background Some American households experience food insecurity, where access to adequate food is limited by lack of money and other resources. As such, we implemented a free 6-month Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program within a large urban safety-net hospital .
Methods 32 participants completed a baseline and postintervention qualitative evaluation about food-related behaviour 6 months after study completion. Deductive codes were developed based on the key topics addressed in the interviews; inductive codes were identified from analytically reading the transcripts. Transcripts were coded in MAXQDA V.12 (Release 12.3.2).
Results The information collected in the qualitative interviews highlights the many factors that affect dietary habits, including the environmental and individual influences that play a role in food choices people make. Participants expressed very positive sentiments overall about their programme participation.
Conclusions A multifaceted intervention that targets individual behaviour change, enhances nutritional knowledge and skills, and reduces socioeconomic barriers to accessing fresh produce may enhance participant knowledge and self-efficacy around healthy eating. However, socioeconomic factors remain as continual barriers to sustaining healthy eating over the long term. Ongoing efforts that address social determinants of health may be necessary to promote sustainability of behaviour change.
- nutritional treatment
- nutrition assessment
- malnutrition
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors All authors listed have contributed sufficiently to the project to be included as authors, and all those who are qualified to be authors are listed in the author byline. Authors’ contributions: EC conducted the study and the analysis for the study, and helped to write up the study. SRS (MD) gave idea for study and helped plan and conduct the study and helped write up the study. TLH (MD, MPH, MS, FACP) helped plan, developed and conducted the study along with helping write up the study. SB helped plan, developed and conducted the study along with helping to write up the study. GK (MD) helped plan the study and write up the study. JB-J (MD, FACP) helped plan and developed the study. AWG (PhD) supervised and assisted EC in conducting the study and analysing the study and helped to write up the study.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval All study protocols, informed consent documents and tools were reviewed and approved by the hospital review board and deemed exempt from review by Emory University Institutional Review Board. All participants gave verbal informed consent to participate and provided permission to record the call.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.