Hospital Meals Project

Our objectives are:
(i) to increase hospital access and decrease defaulting/abandon of treatments;
(ii) to support nutritional rehabilitation of patients, especially women in the postpartum period.

Planning

Access to healthcare is a right that must be promoted and defended to ensure the wellbeing of all families. Especially among the most vulnerable populations, access to essential health services is often limited. In line with the 'Mama Kit and Hospital Transportation' project, to increase access to hospital care, we have decided to limit the additional costs of hospitalization, in this case by providing hospital meals for patients and their caregivers. Additionally, the goal is also to support nutritional rehabilitation, especially for the most serious patients and women in the pre and postpartum period.

It is common practice in Ugandan hospitals not to have a free meal service. Patients are therefore required to obtain each meal by their own means, and whenever these are not sufficient, they may skip meals or go without eating for several days. This, before the implementation of our project, led to often too short hospital stays with many cases of early discharge, defaulting and abandoning of the treatment, as both patients and their caregivers needed to return to their communities to find food. It should be remembered that in these contexts, people work to earn money for meals on the same day, so each day of hospitalization is a day without income and possibly without means to secure a meal.

The strategies, based on scientific and operational evidence, that we have decided to implement are: (i) Provision of meals in the hospital to limit additional costs related to hospitalization, and therefore increase the acceptability of hospital stays and extended stays where necessary, (ii) Provision of foods with high nutritional value to support nutritional rehabilitation in the most serious patients and women in the pre-postpartum period.

Expected Results

Our objectives for 2025-26 are to (i) continue distributing meals, optimizing the quality of the diet to improve patients' nutritional rehabilitation, and (ii) add a component of specific food education for patients related to the diseases that led to their hospital admission.

Results Achieved

Through this project we have achieved the following results: (i) more than 1,000 hospitalizations received daily meals for the patients and their caregivers, (ii) The number of hospital admissions has increased, as access barriers have been reduced, (iii) Mortality in villages due to delayed access to care has decreased, (iv) There have been no more cases of early discharge since the project was implemented.