Joint Strategic Needs Assessment Food Insecurity Panel - Public Health Dorset
Joint Strategic Needs Assessment Food Insecurity Panel
Food insecurity is the inability to afford, or the uncertainty of access to, nutritionally adequate and safe foods that make up a healthy diet. It's about the quality of food as well as the quantity. It's not just about hunger but also about being appropriately nourished to attain and maintain good health. It's also about a limited ability to access food in a socially acceptable way e.g. without having to resort to emergency food aid, scavenging, stealing or other coping strategies.
It doesn't just include people in food poverty, but people and families who worry about their ability to obtain food, compromise on the quality, reduce or skip meals and at the severe end experience hunger.
Current Picture
Using findings from the Food Foundation report and data from the Census for local population and household types, we can arrive at a local estimate for the number of people or households not spending enough money on food to have a healthy diet. Around 351,700 people across the Our Dorset ICS area are estimated to not spend enough money on food and non-alcoholic drinks each week in order to meet government's guidelines for a health diet. Looking at household types with children, 165,100 people are not spending enough to have a healthy diet.
We know from local data that around 1.5% of the population across Our Dorset are accessing food bank and are in food poverty. The number of people across BCP and Dorset who are food insecure and/or not eating a sufficiently nutritious diet are represented by the Triangle of Need.
Food-Security-Triangle-of-Need-in-Tableau
Local Insights
The system challenge of food insecurity on our communities is illustrated below. This work in progress identifies a number of underlying causal factors that we believe account for food insecurity and/or poor diet.
In this map, all system challenges appear to limit the achievement of a “Healthy Diet” for people within our community.These challenges include:
- poverty
- poor/limited food choices
- availability of fresh food
- the skills to use healthy foods to prepare a good diet
The embedded Kumu map, below, is interactive:
- hover the mouse over an element of interest to see its immediate relationships
- left click and hold to refocus the map on that element
- to return to the wider map, left click and hold on any ‘white space’ in the map.
For greater interactivity and access to side panels containing additional information and links, follow the link under the embedded Kumu map (how do I read a systems map).
JSNA Food Insecurity Systems Map
Below is a logic model of our theory-of-change for food insecurity related services provided by Local Authorities and non-governmental organisations. These services and the outcomes they are trying to achieve are illustrated here at a high level. This work in progress identifies several key services and a wide range of sought after outcomes including positive environmental and economic outcomes.
This model suggests that there is an central management and engagement activity in the delivery of a wide range of deliverables.
The embedded Kumu map, below, is interactive. Hover the mouse over an element of interest to see its immediate relationships; left-click-and-hold to refocus the map on that element. To return to the wider map, left-click-and-hold on any ‘white space’ in the map. For greater interactivity and access to side panels containing additional information and links, follow the link under the embedded Kumu map (how do I read a logic model).
JSNA Food Insecurity Logic model
Further resources
We have attempted to understand what the Food Foundation Report, Affordability of the Eatwell Guide (see also, Four million UK children too poor to have a healthy diet study finds, Patrick Butler, Wed 5 Sep 2018), means for Our Dorset.
The results, below, suggest that more than half of the Our Dorset population is food insecure and/or not eating a healthy enough diet.
