Food Insecurity Among Hospital Outpatients: Prevalence, Screening and What Departments Can Do About It
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22278542Keywords:
Food insecurity, Screening, Hospital outpatients, Referral, Health inequalitiesAbstract
Detection is not the difficulty here. A two-item screener validated against the eighteen-item reference module in 5,039 respondents
returned 96.7 per cent sensitivity and 86.2 per cent specificity, takes under a minute and has been validated across diverse
populations. What it finds depends on where it is applied: food insecurity affects more than 12.8 per cent of households nationally,
above 20 per cent of emergency department attenders, 24 per cent of 426 hepatology outpatients at a tertiary centre, and 74 per
cent of patients at student-run free clinics. In the hepatology cohort, dependent alcohol intake, alcohol-related liver disease,
cirrhosis and depression all predicted insecurity. The weak point sits after the positive result: in one programme, 12.5 per cent of
those not using the referral had lost it or did not recall receiving it.
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