UCI Department of Emergency Medicine Takes Steps to Address Food Insecurity
By Armin Takallou
November 16th, 2019
“If a mother has to choose between using her money to fill her prescription or feed her kids, she will often choose to forgo her own medical treatment,” says Co-Investigator Dr. Victor Cisneros, MD, MPH. This highlights the unfortunate reality that many patients face in their medical care when they do not have enough money to pay for both their medical treatment and have enough left over for their other basic living costs. At the UCI Medical Center (UCIMC) Department of Emergency Medicine, a large portion of their patients are uninsured and come from low-income backgrounds. In order to practice the most effective medicine, the patients’ social determinants of health need to be taken into consideration, an initiative taken on through a research project created by Dr. Cisneros in 2017.
Over the past two years, UCI undergraduate students with the Emergency Medicine Research Associates Program (EMRAP) have been working with Principal Investigator Dr. Bharath Chakravarthy, MD, MPH, and Co-Investigator Dr. Victor Cisneros, MD, MPH, on a program to help assess the level of food insecurity at the emergency department at UCI Medical Center and understand the feasibility of implementing a food resource referral program. The Feasibility of an emergency-department-based food insecurity screening & referral program research team consists of Tiffany Hwang, Shashank Somasundaram, Holly Nguyen, Zaid Parekh, Armin Takallou, Alejandro Avina, Hasan Khan, Joseph Bui, and Hilary Tang. WasteNotOC Coalition has generously funded this program, and over the course of the project, the team has screened over 2,500 patients at the UCI Department of Emergency Medicine for food insecurity and provided over 400 referrals to food services for patients who screened positive for food insecurity.
For more information on current research studies at the UCI Department of Emergency Medicine and to get involved with EMRAP, please visit https://www.emergencymed.uci.edu/emrap/index.asp.
For more information on food pantries and resources in your area, please visit https://www.wastenotoc.org/pantries/.
To look up Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week events and programs at UCI, please visit http://blumcenter.uci.edu/category/hhaw/.
