AGENCY TESTIMONY
Goals and focus areas of Healthy NYC
0:12:50
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3 min
Dr. Morse outlines the ambitious goals and key focus areas of the Healthy NYC initiative, emphasizing the aim to increase life expectancy and address major health challenges.
- The primary goal is to raise NYC's life expectancy to 83 years by 2030
- Focus areas include addressing chronic diseases, screenable cancers, overdose, suicide, maternal mortality, violence, and COVID-19
- The initiative is structured around three pillars: public education, cross-sector collaboration, and targeted resource allocation
- Equity is emphasized as the foundation unifying all aspects of the initiative
Michelle Morse
0:12:50
We've set out to raise the life expectancy of our city to its highest ever level, 83 years by 2030.
0:12:57
To achieve that overarching goal, Healthy NYC sets ambitious targets to address the greatest drivers of premature death, including chronic and diet related diseases, screenable cancers, overdose, suicide, maternal mortality, violence, and COVID 19.
0:13:14
As acting health commissioner and as a practicing physician at Health and Hospitals Kings County, I have seen firsthand how these drivers impact New Yorkers.
0:13:24
They degrade our health and shorten our lifespans.
0:13:27
We're excited to discuss our activities over the last year with you, including the release of our latest datasets, which we announced at our recent Healthy NYC Symposium.
0:13:36
I also want to express my gratitude to speaker Adams, chair Shulman, and all the members of the city council who voted to make Healthy NYC a local law.
0:13:46
From its inception, Healthy NYC was designed to be an evolving project.
0:13:51
By codifying this work, you all help to ensure that we continue to reevaluate our goals and approaches in accordance with the latest data.
0:13:59
You also helped preserve Healthy NYC as a permanent part of the architecture of this city regardless of changes in administrations and commissioners alike.
0:14:08
We appreciate your commitment to this endeavor, and we thank you for working with us to accomplish this goal.
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By adopting a goal of raising our city's life expectancy, we have committed ourselves to improving a critical measure of society's progress.
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We're part of a field that has dramatically remade human history.
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Public health has proven its value time and time again through improvements in sanitation, water infrastructure, vaccinations, and more, and we've been able to extend life expectancy in our city and our country by several decades over the course of history.
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It's now time to take another leap forward.
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We're coming off the heels of a pandemic that took years off of our lives.
0:14:48
In New York City in particular, life expectancy dropped by nearly 5 years in 2020.
0:14:54
We need to recover the years lost and extend life expectancy, which had stagnated for nearly a decade before the pandemic.
0:15:02
The New York City Health Department is the oldest and largest health department in the country.
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We have a staff of over 7,000 people, and we possess both deep public health expertise and a clear commitment to racial equity.
0:15:14
The latter has been notably absent from major public health advancements over the course of our history.
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For instance, reliable access to clean drinking water helped dramatically increase national life expectancy, but access to that water was not and is still not shared equitably.
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Most places you look in education, housing, and beyond, outcomes across our society are stratified by race and by wealth.
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This time, as we set out to improve life expectancy, we've resolved to interrupt a long historical pattern of indifference towards racial inequities and unfair access to life saving treatments.
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To that end, we have structured our work around 3 distinct pillars.
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The first is our public campaign, which aims to educate New Yorkers about our work and the resources available to them.
0:16:00
The second is our commitment to bring together experts and stakeholders from often siloed sectors, be that public and private, community and government, or public health and clinical care.
0:16:10
The last pillar is our recognition that none of this work matters unless we change the way we focus our resources.
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We are working to ensure that public health interventions with proven success continue to make an impact.
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The foundation that unifies all three of these pillars is equity.
