Testing a Prioritization Tool to Identify Older Adults in Need of Home-Delivered Meals and Nutrition-Related Services

The Expanded Food Security Screener (FSS-Exp) determines food insecurity risk based on physical, economic, and social access to food. It categorizes individuals into 5 priorities based on need for a home-delivered meal. Concurrent and construct validity were applied to the tool. For concurrent validity, partial correlations between FSS-Exp and health- and food-related measures were significant and ranged between 0.20 and 0.33. For construct validity, analysis of variance was used to examine scores of the health- and food-related tools by priority level. The 2 highest priority levels had significantly lower mean scores for all the health variables except for dietary intake. The FSS-Exp tool effectively identifies those most in need of meal services.