AGENCY TESTIMONY
Overview and goals of the Community Care Plan
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151 sec
Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez provides an overview of NYC Aging's Community Care Plan, developed in 2021 to address the needs of the growing older adult population in New York City. The plan aims to support older adults as they age in place in their homes and communities.
- The plan is linked to the city's goal of increasing life expectancy post-COVID
- It recognizes that New Yorkers want to age in place and are living longer
- The plan builds on existing community care elements and expands services through new RFPs
Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez
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And our vision for aging services for older adults today, but also into the future because we know what the growth is.
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At its heart, the Community Care Plan was developed to comprehensively address the needs and realities of an aging population.
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This plan is inextricably linked to the city's overall goal of increasing life expectancy post COVID, and also public health successes, which means that older New Yorkers are healthier, living longer, and spending a greater portion of their lives as older adults.
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It's really an interesting thing, and I'm going off off my topic again.
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Off my notes.
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It's an interesting thing because we saw longevity reduce overall for the city.
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And one of the things that our partner in the Department of Health was saying, okay, how do we all work towards increasing longevity?
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At the same time that the older adult population is exploding.
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So it's one thing that we're we're all looking at.
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So our post COVID programming is key.
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We cannot promote policy solutions to improve people's health when they are young and middle aged without also ensuring that there is a robust support of social service structure in place to meet the needs when they become older adults.
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The reality is that New Yorkers want to age in place.
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They wanna live in their homes.
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And in the communities that they help build and that they're living longer in this process.
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The community care plan as the chairwoman Appley state, it was developed in 2021.
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As part of a recognition that the growing and changing landscape of older adult population would require new approaches to ensure that New York City supports older adults as they age in place in their homes and communities.
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This allowed NYC Aging to build on existing community care elements that were ready in place.
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None of these are new services, but it is the way we're looking at those services.
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The plan was released in conjunction with the 2021 older adult center and nork's naturally occurring retirement communities, request for proposal, which expanded the number of centers and resources for older adults.
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The goal was to grow the existing NYC aging network of programs and services to be more responsive to the current and anticipated community needs of older adults.
