Student-initiated Food Pharmacy Promotes Health and Humanity

Katrina Dietsche and Jason Weinstein, second-year MD students at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), bonded during their first year over their shared passion for preventative health. Before starting medical school, Dietsche had witnessed the huge impact the food pharmacy at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC had on the lives and health of patients and their families, from a preventative health perspective. Therefore, when Dietsche and Weinstein learned that food insecurity was common in New Haven and at the HAVEN Free Clinic—the student-run primary care clinic that partners with Yale University to provide health care to uninsured adults in the New Haven community—they decided HAVEN could be a perfect setting for a food pharmacy.

Inspired by this idea, Dietsche and Weinstein co-founded the HAVEN Food Pharmacy initiative and have been dedicated to its development since the fall of 2023. This included spending their first year of medical school meeting with food pantries around New Haven to get advice on how to start a program in a community-oriented and equitable way. After a year of research and planning, the food pharmacy opened on Saturday, November 2, 2024, and now is open every Saturday, in conjunction with HAVEN Free Clinic.

Each week, Dietsche and Weinstein go grocery shopping, buying ingredients for recipes prepared by their team of dietary advisors from sources like the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association. The students store the perishable items in a cooler at the clinic and organize the nonperishable items on tables, to create a grocery store environment.

Dietsche explains that “When patients attend their clinic visits with their care team, they’re screened for nutritionally-related chronic diseases including diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. If they have one of these chronic conditions, they are asked two well-validated questions to screen for food insecurity. If they screen positive, they’re ‘prescribed’ a visit to our Food Pharmacy.” At the Food Pharmacy, the students provide nutrition education and 10-15 meals worth of groceries for the patients and their families.

In addition to Dietsche and Weinstein, the Food Pharmacy’s executive team includes Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) students Siyun Li and Priya Khimani as dietary advisors; Tomeka Frieson, a research associate in the YSPH, and Yale Graduate School student Ju Hyun Lee as research leads; and YSPH student Shruti Parthasarathy as community liaison. “We’re fortunate,” says Weinstein, “to have the guidance of our faculty advisors, Dr. Angela Kang-Giaimo and Dr. Nate Wood, whose expertise has been instrumental to our growth.” Beyond this core team, over 15 dedicated weekend volunteers assist in serving patients on clinic days.

Weinstein expressed deep gratitude “for the unwavering support from HAVEN's executive directors and Dean Illuzzi, whose advocacy helped bring this initiative to life.” Illuzzi, the deputy dean for education at YSM, in turn, says she is “so proud of the students’ initiative to create the Food Pharmacy and all their hard work to see it to fruition. We currently often spend our energy treating diseases caused by unhealthy eating. The Food Pharmacy importantly enables us to promote healthy eating and address the underlying causes of illnesses, preventing diseases in the first place.”

Dietsche and Weinstein also are grateful for the generous funding granted by the Hellman Foundation. Dietsche explains that Richard D. Gibbs, MD ’86, and Patricia H. Gibbs, MD ’87, on the foundation’s board and founders of the San Francisco Free Clinic and longtime supporters of the HAVEN Free Clinic, were excited to provide seed funding to support efforts to reduce food insecurity. “We were made aware of these donors by the YSM Office of Development and Alumni Affairs,” Dietsche says, “and worked with their support to write a grant proposal for our Food Pharmacy.”

The major goals for the Food Pharmacy, according to Dietsche, are “that it reduces rates of food insecurity in New Haven and reduces the burdens of chronic diseases on the health of members of our community.” The students are designing a research protocol to assess these outcomes. “We plan to enroll a small group of patients to invite to regular visits at the Food Pharmacy,” explains Dietsche. The patients would receive roughly half the groceries they need for the month, tailored to their specific disease state. The study will incorporate surveys and a review of patients’ medical records to monitor their health through the program.

Dietsche adds that smaller, though not less important, goals are “that this program sparks a sense of joy and community from the patients. The stressful burden that food insecurity causes cannot be understated, and we hope this program invites a sense of wonder that accompanies learning how to prepare new meals." Additionally, the students hope the Food Pharmacy reminds patients that HAVEN “is focused on their holistic health and wants to support their health journey in and outside of the clinic,” says Dietsche.

The biggest challenges in setting up the Food Pharmacy mirror those faced by similar programs across the country—securing sustainable funding and establishing a strong research framework to measure impact effectively, according to Weinstein. The students are committed to a community-engaged research model. “This means the patients who benefit from our food assistance are directly involved in shaping the program. Their insights inform both the intervention itself and the questions we ask to evaluate its success,” Weinstein explains, continuing, “By prioritizing their voices, we aim to create a program that truly meets their needs and demonstrates measurable benefits.”

With recent grants from the Hellman Foundation and the New Haven County Medical Association Foundation, the students are equipped to enhance their current program and explore avenues for sustainable expansion. The long-term vision, says Weinstein, is “to provide consistent, healthy groceries to every food-insecure patient at HAVEN Free Clinic, a goal of seeing about 80 patients during a single clinic day.” In the future, they hope to establish the Food Pharmacy as a permanent feature of patient care at Yale New Haven Hospital, “integrating it into the standard health care model for addressing food insecurity.”

What excites Dietsche and Weinstein most about the Food Pharmacy is the chance to address an enormous unmet need. On the first day it opened, Weinstein describes how “a patient shared her deep worry about how she would fill her son’s lunchbox for the week. She teared up, overwhelmed, and then told us how much relief she felt because of the Food Pharmacy. For her, it meant her child wouldn’t go hungry.” Weinstein said that he and Dietsche “think about that story often as we continue our clinic operations.” Reflecting, Weinstein says, “Providing food to patients is a kind of sustenance that lingers, long after the hunger fades, because it carries with it the grace of being cared for, of being seen. A bag of groceries does not solve the world's pain, but it softens it, just enough to make us believe in something better. And sometimes, that’s enough.”