EPISODE 38
Oct 16, 2024

A bold plan to increase life expectancy in NYC

Like other cities, New York had a dramatic decrease in life expectancy in 2020. New York City Health Commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, joins us to talk about the city’s ambitious campaign to turn this around, with the aim of increasing life expectancy to 83 years by 2030. What will it take to make New York the healthiest big city in America? It will take an “all of community” effort tackling the most important causes of premature death from maternal mortality and chronic disease to suicide and overdose.
 
We discuss:
  • What Paul Farmer taught him about rejecting a scarcity mindset and reaching for bold goals
  • The three cross-cutting challenges addressed in the Healthy NYC agenda: access to primary care, mental health and climate change
  • Why NY issued a public health advisory on teen social media use and is suing Meta, Tik Tok YouTube and SnapChat

 Ashwin shares why youth social media use is such a major public health priority:

“Our kids are hurting … Fifty percent of teens are saying that they are either moderately or severely depressed …It's hard to ignore the role that digital media and social media is playing … And what we found was pretty troubling …The more time you're spending on social media, the worse your self -reported mental health is. Whether it's symptoms of depression, anxiety, hopelessness, fear for the future.”

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ABOUT OUR GUEST

Commissioner Vasan is a practicing primary care physician, epidemiologist and public health expert with nearly 20 years of experience working to improve physical and mental health, social welfare and public policy outcomes for marginalized populations in New York City, nationally and globally.

In his role as Commissioner since early 2022, Dr. Vasan has reshaped the city’s public health system to focus on addressing the main drivers of declining life expectancy in the post-COVID emergency era, including overdoses, chronic and diet-related diseases, birth inequities, climate change, and gun violence, while simultaneously strengthening the Health Department’s emergency response-readiness capacities.

Throughout this work, he has brought in a unique, unparalleled focus to combating the mental health crisis, releasing a comprehensive citywide mental health plan addressing the second pandemic – a crisis of mental health plaguing youth, vulnerable New Yorkers with severe mental illness, and those impacted by the overdose epidemic. Dr. Vasan has concurrently led several other key health priorities, such as leading the ongoing response to COVID-19 as the first American jurisdiction to kickstart vaccination efforts, combatting the 2022 mpox outbreak and pioneering readiness and response to the first case of polio in the US in a decade. Under his leadership, the city also took charge on protecting reproductive rights by launching the NYC Abortion Access Hub, connecting people from New York and nationwide to providers and becoming the first jurisdiction in the US to offer free medication abortions in its clinics. Having begun his career in global health working at Partners in Health and the HIV Department of the World Health Organization, he most recently served as the President and CEO of Fountain House, a US-based mental health nonprofit. He currently serves as faculty at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Dr. Vasan received his BA in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles; his ScM in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health; his MD from the University of Michigan; and his PhD in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He completed his clinical training in internal medicine-primary care at New York Presbyterian Hospital. His work has been published extensively in academic literature in journals such as the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Health Policy and Planning, and AIDS, and has been featured in several mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, BBC World News, NPR, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, and NBC. Megan L. Ranney is an emergency physician, researcher, and national advocate for innovative approaches to public health. In July 2023, she joined Yale University as Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, where she is also the C.-E. A. Winslow Professor of Public Health. Her research focuses on developing, testing, and disseminating digital health interventions to prevent violence and related behavioral health problems, and on COVID-related risk reduction. She has held multiple national leadership roles, including as co-founder of GetUsPPE during the COVID-19 pandemic and Senior Strategic Advisor to AFFIRM at the Aspen Institute, focused on ending gun violence through a non-partisan public health approach. She was previously the Warren Alpert Endowed Professor of Emergency Medicine, Deputy Dean of the School of Public Health, and Founding Director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health at Brown University. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the Aspen Health Innovators’ Fellowship, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She earned her bachelor's degree in history of science, graduating summa cum laude, from Harvard University; her medical doctorate, graduating Alpha Omega Alpha, from Columbia University; and her master’s degree in public health from Brown University. She completed her residency in Emergency Medicine and a fellowship in Injury Prevention Research at Brown University.

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