Project Details
Establishing a Teaching Kitchen for Residents and Community Wellbeing
Latrobe Family Medicine Residency
This Latrobe Hospital Family Medicine Residency Teaching Kitchen is structured to address many common chronic diseases and how to cope with them in the kitchen. The vision is for patients, residents, and students to learn the basics of nutrition and healthy food preparation in a teaching kitchen in the context of a longitudinal curriculum.
Building the Kitchen
We were able to utilize an abandoned small cafeteria and had to get it up to code. Next, we purchased equipment, planning to select equipment that most residents and patients would tend to use at home. The program purchased the Health Meets Food Curriculum from the American College of Culinary Medicine.
Cooking up a Curriculum
After putting the final touches on the space and equipment, monthly Culinary Medicine module completion and hands-on cooking sessions with residents commenced and will continue monthly, ultimately giving each resident a minimum of 12 sessions. Residency faculty and staff have, and will continue, to participate in the training sessions.
Empirically, the Teaching Kitchen Culinary Medicine curriculum has been wildly popular among our residents and faculty. Concepts related to the basics of both food preparation and nutrition as means to further health and well being for members of the residency program were very well received.
We aim to expand the program by adding hands-on patient education sessions during the subsequent academic year and hope to utilize the kitchen as a food distribution site for the Westmoreland County Food Bank.
We are humbled and very appreciative to have been able to participate in the RIG. It has allowed us to set the stage for improved education and patient care, not to mention we are now better situated to address food insecurity in the Latrobe community.
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