The nutritious, award-winning meals loved by UC Davis Medical Middle sufferers at the moment are being served at a neighborhood nonprofit well being care middle to people who find themselves experiencing homelessness.
The every day meal service is offered by UC Davis Well being for gratis to the newly opened WellSpace Well being Gregory Bunker Care Transitions Middle of Excellence. The constructing is a dormitory-like setting in South Sacramento the place individuals experiencing homelessness get better from sickness after being discharged from space hospitals.
About 15,000 meals have been offered because the service started in March.
The association is yet one more aspect of UC Davis Well being’s longstanding dedication to enhancing the well being of the group. WellSpace Well being is a quickly rising Federally Certified Well being Middle that runs a community of amenities that present built-in care to underserved populations in and round Sacramento.
UC Davis Well being, Sutter Well being, Dignity Well being and Kaiser Permanente have supported WellSpace for years, significantly its interim care program, which coordinates the location of people who find themselves homeless and wish further care after leaving the hospital.
This system had operated in homeless shelters and transitioned this spring to a brand new, stand-alone web site on Stockton Boulevard with dozens of beds.
Collectively, in simply the previous few years, the 4 main well being methods have contributed greater than $14 million to help each the previous interim care program and now the brand new Gregory Bunker Care Transitions Middle.
Meal service saves WellSpace Well being at the least $1 million yearly
Throughout planning for the Bunker Middle, UC Davis Well being leaders provided to arrange and ship three meals a day, seven days every week, which saves WellSpace at the least $1 million a 12 months in meals prices alone.
“By UC Davis being an skilled in offering nutritious meals to sufferers, it lets us focus our energies on what we do finest,” mentioned WellSpace Well being CEO Jonathan Porteus, “which is serving individuals in a care transition surroundings, the motivational work, remedy, engagement with well being, behavioral well being providers (and) housing.”
The meals is ready within the medical middle’s large kitchen beneath the route of Govt Chef Santana Diaz whose crew embraces the farm-to-fork precept of buying meals from native growers. UC Davis Well being’s hospital café has obtained a prestigious designation from The James Beard Basis as a Good Catch Chief in 2019 and 2020.
“Regionally sourced meals tends to retain its vitamins significantly better,” mentioned UC Davis Well being CEO David Lubarsky. “Now we’re going to have the ability to lengthen that nice culinary functionality to the care transition middle the place we are able to present that very same nutritious, healthful, wholesome, native meals to those that are recovering in that middle.”
WellSpace Well being shoppers eat the identical meals served to medical middle sufferers on any given day. As soon as the meals is ready, kitchen workers place it in heaters, then onto a truck for supply at WellSpace Well being, which is a brief drive from the hospital.
The meals is then transferred into WellSpace Well being’s personal heaters and served scorching on cafeteria trays.
As a result of the service is run equally to a catering operation, WellSpace Well being doesn’t must equip a full kitchen or rent staff past a chef.
Final week, representatives of the 4 main well being care methods, elected officers, WellSpace Well being leaders and group members gathered beneath an enormous tent to have fun the opening of the Gregory Bunker Care Transition Middle.
Susan Murin, interim dean of the UC Davis Faculty of Medication, obtained applause from the viewers of greater than 100 individuals as she introduced that Bunker Middle shoppers are handled to the identical wholesome delicacies that hospital sufferers, staff and guests eat every day.
“We’re the primary hospital within the nation to obtain a James Beard Award,” she mentioned, proudly.
