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For Patients with Diabetes, Growing Health and Self-Sufficiency One Meal at a Time
Through an award from Direct Relief and the Baxter International Foundation, St. Vincent de Paul’s charitable pharmacy provides nutritional education and support for patients learning to manage their diabetes.
When it comes to improving diabetes outcomes, pharmacist Rusty Curington knows the numbers matter. He also knows they don’t tell the whole story.
Curington is vice president of pharmacy at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a Cincinnati-area nonprofit organization devoted to caring for low-income community members. Among other services, St. Vincent de Paul operates a charitable pharmacy at three locations.
Off the top of his head, Curington remembers that 61% of his pharmacy patients have diabetes. One hundred people will visit St. Vincent de Paul’s food pantry each day to receive food assistance. Helping a patient with diabetes improve their health and connect to a permanent medical home will likely take about six to 12 months. His team offers these and other services, at no cost to patients, because 200 volunteers donate their time. Their comprehensive diabetes management work is bolstered by a new nutrition-centered program, Pantry4Health, founded with a $115,000 award from Direct Relief, provided through a grant from the Baxter International Foundation, which established the Transformative Innovation Awards in Community Health.
Launched in 2019, the Transformative Innovation Awards support community health centers, free and charitable clinics, and nonprofit healthcare organizations that use nutrition to help improve health outcomes for noncommunicable diseases, including diabetes. St. Vincent de Paul was one of five awardees in 2023.
Pantry4Health offers nutritional education to patients with diabetes and helps them cook healthy meals using ingredients from the food pantry. It’s become an integral part of a larger monitoring, education, support, and planning journey that teaches pharmacy patients to effectively manage their diabetes over the long term. Curington reported that Pantry4Health has provided 843 patients with nutrition education thus far, and an additional 1,060 with healthy meal bundles.
But health isn’t just a numbers problem. Key to the success of Pantry4Health is asking for feedback and talking to patients — neighbors, as staff and volunteers call them — about their lives and experiences. “It’s trickier to measure, it’s anecdotal. But then you really get to know people,” Curington said.
The term “neighbors” isn’t used casually; it’s a cornerstone of his philosophy. “I am no different from the person in front of me,” he explained. “There’s a label of equality, the recognition that, if it were not for one thing that happened to me differently, I would be in the same position.”
Dietetic interns prepare for a nutrition education session in the pharmacy’s teaching kitchen. (Photo courtesy of Society of St. Vincent de Paul)
Nutrition education begins as soon as a patient with diabetes begins working with pharmacy staff. Learning to manage blood sugar is essential, as are setting and working toward lifestyle and nutritional goals. Staff follow a detailed protocol of monitoring, follow-up, and assessment. Through interactive demonstrations in the pharmacy’s teaching kitchen, dieticians teach healthy cooking skills.
Pantry4Health began with a focus on donated fresh foods, but Curington quickly learned that produce was too risky — it went bad quickly, it was time-consuming, people weren’t familiar with the offerings. Now, the program teaches pharmacy patients to cook healthy foods using shelf-stable ingredients available in its food pantry. Dieticians and dietetics interns develop easy recipes based on the current offerings and bundle them together. Seasonings are bought in bulk, combined, and measured out for each bundle.
New recipes and bundles are offered monthly. Staff constantly incorporate in feedback. For example, one patient, experiencing homelessness and with nowhere to cook, inspired a recipe for no-bake peanut butter balls with walnuts, oats, and cinnamon. Can openers are available in the pantry because many people don’t own one.
“The meal I was taught today will help me so much because it is a vegetarian meal, and I am diabetic,” said one patient who received nutrition education through Pantry4Health. “I am moving soon, and this will be the first meal I am making for my family at our new home. It was delicious!”
Pharmacy patients discuss the current meal bundle with a volunteer. (Photo courtesy of Society of St. Vincent de Paul)
Sometimes inspiration is born of necessity. A beloved Hawaiian tuna rice bowl recipe began when canned tuna sat unwanted on food pantry shelves. Realizing that “we’ve gotta move this tuna,” Curington recalled, recipe developers combined it with coconut flakes and pineapple. Despair over canned salmon was resolved when a receptionist who grew up in the South taught other staff members to make a salmon croquette. Chickpeas and couscous weren’t popular — “no one knew what to do with them” — until a Mediterranean bowl recipe.
The Transformative Innovation Award has also been a jumping-off point for new partnerships, including with the University of Cincinnati. St. Vincent de Paul now offers internships to dietetics students who want to focus on caring for vulnerable communities. “We didn’t have a program that would attract them” before this, Curington said. “When a nonprofit gives us funding, we brag about it a lot, it builds credibility, and it really helps bring more resources in.”
Offering free medication and chronic disease management — there is no cash register at any of St. Vincent de Paul’s three pharmacy locations — means thinking strategically about long-term goals. Curington doesn’t want to build up a patient roster or even have permanent patients. “If I just keep collecting people, I won’t be able to [work with] new patients,” he said. The end goal is to “help people transition out of the safety net. No one wants to live in the net.”
St. Vincent de Paul’s charitable pharmacy offers the Pantry4Health program as part of a comprehensive focus on improving diabetes management and health outcomes. (Photo courtesy of Society of St. Vincent de Paul)
It’s a complex process that involves helping patients apply for insurance, learn to exercise and manage medical conditions — even to get them off medication if possible — and design a plan to maintain their health and well-being.
That often takes six months to a year, but patients who need longer-term support to implement a plan receive it. Curington knows inflation, housing shortages, and the shifting public insurance landscape stack the deck against people who are already vulnerable. Someone who seeks out St. Vincent de Paul because they can’t pay rent and still afford medicine needs immediate support, but they also need a partner who can help them build stability over time.
St. Vincent de Paul’s goal is to be that partner, Curington explained. Volunteers and interns are there because they want their neighbors to thrive.
“Our love for our town, our love for our community, we’re blending that into our mission,” he said.
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