Mayor de Blasio unveiled two new health care initiatives Wednesday that are aimed at continuing New York City’s battle with COVID, preparing for future pandemics and addressing long-term health problems among disadvantaged New Yorkers.
“If [there’s] one thing this pandemic has taught us, it is the profound value of public health, of a strategy that reaches to the grass roots, that gives people access to health care in ways we have just not done enough of in the past,” de Blasio said Wednesday morning. “This is a moment to do things very, very differently.”
One of his new initiatives will refocus the city’s Test & Trace Corps — which was formed to track COVID and impede its spread — to more broadly address underlying health concerns people face in neighborhoods with relatively little access to health care.
That program, the Public Health Corps, will rely on partnerships with community-based organizations and will task city health officials with visiting underserved New Yorkers in their homes. It also aims to encourage people who haven’t yet been vaccinated for COVID to get their shots.
Test & Trace Corps Executive Director Dr. Ted Long, who will help launch the new program, estimated the city would employ more than 500 community health workers for the Public Health Corps and that they’d reach “tens of thousands” of people.
“I’m a primary care doctor myself,” he said. “With the new Public Health Corps, I will have community health workers on my primary care team, by my side, that can go to my patients’ homes, to help them to get food, to help them to get their medications, to help them navigate our health care system, and to help them to live a healthier life.”
The other new initiative de Blasio announced, the Pandemic Response Institute, will use “up to” $20 million in city funding and will be geared toward preparing for future pandemics and other health emergencies.
The institute will focus on developing ways to better collect epidemiological data in real time, scaling up technological solutions to health emergencies and improving pandemic preparedness. It will be housed and operated by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in partnership with the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. Columbia won the role after responding to a request for proposals from the city in April.
“The truth is that we don’t know when the next public health emergency will hit us or the next pandemic will be, but we have to assume that there will be another pandemic,” said City Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan), chairman of the Council’s Health Committee. “What used to be once-in-a-lifetime public health events, now we have to be ready for them to happen much more often.”
