In New York and around the nation, efforts are underway to transform the health care system to achieve the Triple Aim of lower costs, better care, and better health. Attention to low income populations and historically disadvantaged groups is key, given the health inequities such groups face. Recognizing these concerns, this report presents an overview of findings from a comprehensive community needs assessment (CNA) conducted on behalf of multiple large New York City (NYC) hospital systems and their partners. A CNA on a comparable scale, with respect to population and subject matter, has not been conducted in NYC previously. As part of the CNA, we engaged primarily low income and uninsured NYC residents, and the agency and community-based organization (CBO) staff that work with them, and asked--through interviews, focus groups, and brief surveys--for descriptions of health priorities, concerns, and perceptions, as well as recommendations for programmatic and systemic changes that might improve health and the delivery of health care services. In this overview of the CNA findings and the resulting data briefs, this series--City Voices: New Yorkers on Health--gives a voice to the health needs of people in the city who are oftentimes invisible or unheard. Each brief in the series does this by highlighting informative personal experiences covering a range of health-related issues and offering recommendations for individual, community, provider, and systemic approaches, which included: addressing the broader determinants of health, expanding community health worker programs, improving integration and coordination of care, health education, and targeted services to the highest need individuals. Several of these recommendations are consistent with New York State and NYC initiatives, such as the NYS Population Health Improvement Program, which seeks to promote health across communities; support for the Advanced Primary Care model, which integrates behavioral health and supportive services with primary care; and the NYC Connections to Care program, which links community based organizations and mental health providers. As additional programming is developed, our hope is that the findings described here--and in subsequent reports focusing on transgender health, mental health, immigrant health, nutrition, aging, and other topics--may prove useful to policy makers, program administrators, funders, and community residents.
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