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Health Department Launches New Campaign to Promote Longer, Healthier Lives in New York City.

HealthyNYC is the City’s Health Agenda That Aims to Extend New Yorkers’ Lifespans to Record Lengths by 2030.

June 5, 2024 — The NYC Health Department this week launched a campaign promoting the city’s health agenda that aims to promote longer, healthier lives. The campaign, which gives New Yorkers helpful tips to healthier lifestyles, will run for four weeks starting June 3.

“Creating a healthier city is a team sport, and will take all of us working together, including every government agency, private sector partners, and our vibrant nonprofit and philanthropic institutions,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan. “Most of all, it will need everyday New Yorkers to get involved and to take the reins of their health, which is what this campaign is really about. We’re so excited to engage with residents in the weeks ahead to promote healthier, longer lives in our city.”

HealthyNYC seeks to extend the average life expectancy of New Yorkers to record lengths. Unveiled last fall, HealthyNYC sets ambitious and measurable targets to reduce the impacts of leading causes of premature death, risk factors, and excess deaths, including chronic and diet-related diseases, screenable cancers, overdoses, suicide, maternal mortality, violence, and COVID-19.

The campaign aims to meet the following goals by 2030:

• Reduce cardiovascular disease and diabetes by 5 percent;
• Reduce screenable cancers — including lung, breast, colon, cervical, and prostate cancers — by 20 percent;
• Reduce overdose deaths by 25 percent;
• Reduce suicide deaths by 10 percent;
• Reduce homicide deaths by 30 percent;
• Reduce pregnancy-associated mortality among Black women by 10 percent; and
• Reduce annual COVID-19 deaths by 60 percent.

Overall, the campaign aims to extend the average life expectancy of New Yorkers to 83 years by 2030, with gains across racial and ethnic groups, and is backed up by Local Law 0093-2024, passed in March, which ensures that HealthyNYC is a permanent feature of civic planning in New York City, with the HealthyNYC life expectancy agenda required to be reported on and updated every five years.

In support of HealthyNYC, ads will be placed in subway stations, neighborhood charging stations via NYCLink, neighborhood screens in convenience stores, salons and supermarkets, TV, radio, digital and social media, and newspapers in the top 13 languages. The citywide campaign will remind New Yorkers that being healthy and living life as the best version of oneself is achievable with simple, doable behavior modifications.

The HealthyNYC plan aims to address the life years lost during the COVID-19 pandemic to the virus and other causes and surpass life expectancy from what it was pre-pandemic, in an era of flatlining or falling lifespans across the United States. Between 2019 and 2020, overall life expectancy across demographics fell to 78 years. Life expectancy in New York City has begun to improve, with 2.7 years gained back from 2020 to 2021, however life expectancy remains well behind 2019. These impacts have also not been felt equally, as life expectancy fell to 76.1 years among Black New Yorkers in 2021, compared to 81.8 years among white New Yorkers.

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MEDIA CONTACT: Patrick Gallahue / Rachel Vick
PressOffice@health.nyc.gov