Advancing the New York State Prevention Agenda to Improve Community Health

The New York State Department of Health created the Prevention Agenda 2013–2017 to provide a framework and roadmap to foster statewide implementation of activities designed to improve population health in New York State.

All New York State counties were required to submit a Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) on their strategies for advancing the State’s Prevention Agenda and how they would collaborate with health care institutions, local health departments, and community-based organizations to achieve their goals.

To help energize the implementation of the CHIPs, NYHealth issued a Request for Proposals (RFP), “Advancing New York State’s Prevention Agenda: A Matching Funds Program to Implement Community Health Improvement Plans,” to support local health departments with the most innovative and feasible projects in executing their plans. Through this RFP, NYHealth invested $500,000 in 17 organizations to help 27 county health departments across the State advance the goals of the Prevention Agenda. NYHealth also provided two grants totaling $549,977 to the New York Academy of Medicine to offer technical assistance to the local health departments and their community-based counterparts as they launched and carried out their CHIPs. As a result, counties put into action a wide range of prevention efforts, such as increasing breast-feeding, reducing asthma-related emergency department visits, implementing Complete Streets policies, preventing falls among elderly New Yorkers, and providing nutrition education in schools.