The Florida Blue Foundation Sapphire Awards program in April recognized its first-place honoree, resulting in a $100,000 check for Feeding Tampa Bay’s FoodRX program.
Collectively, the nine 2024 award recipients received $525,000 for “doing exemplary work in their local communities to improve health outcomes and increase access to health care services and support.”
Recognized as the first food pharmacy in the state, FoodRX provides food prescriptions to adults with diet-related health conditions in Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties. Patients receive a prescription to visit a food pharmacy co-located at the site of their medical appointments.
“We know when someone is coming out of a health care crisis of some sort, longtime viability and capability is largely dependent on nutrition,” said Feeding Tampa Bay CEO Thomas Mantz in a video about the FoodRX program. “Our theory was, let’s build a FoodRX program, something we would take for granted, and make that available for individuals and families at a much larger scale.”
One such individual is FoodRX patient Herman Dallas, who in the video speaks of the program’s life-altering benefits as a “tough guy not wanting to go to the doctor” who later learned he had kidney failure and needed dialysis and a transplant.
“I had to eat different, I had to think different, I had to work different and I learned the type of foods that I needed to eat to help me … get better and how important it was to eat the right foods,” Dallas said.
Also featured in the video is Rachel Bozich, ambulatory project manager for Tampa General Hospital, who spoke about the Tampa Well Community Garden and Food Pharmacy. The 1-acre garden, connected to a primary care facility, along with a food pharmacy, is “an opportunity for us to really systematically prescribe food as medicine to our patients,” Bozich said.
Praise for the program comes from Felecia Johnson, whose primary doctor sent her to FoodRX. “You don’t have to pay for the food,” Johnson said, “and food is very expensive, especially fruits and vegetables.”
For more on how Feeding Tampa Bay is working with health care partners to open food prescription programs, visit https://feedingtampabay.org/ways-we-serve/foodrx.
