Institute for Healthcare Improvement

A key goal of NYHealth’s Building Healthy Communities priority area is to help communities make changes that lead to more New Yorkers of all ages eating healthy foods, being physically active, and having access to a range of programs that encourage healthy life choices.

A need has emerged from several of NYHealth’s Healthy Neighborhoods Fund organization leaders to move to the next level of programming and be empowered to design large-scale, health-focused, community-appropriate interventions and methods for evaluating of such programs. To address this need, NYHealth awarded Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) a grant in 2016 to host Healthy Neighborhoods Fund grantees in a community health fellowship program.

With NYHealth funding, IHI developed and hosted an intensive, year-long fellowship program on community health improvement and leadership development. Fellows learned the skills to design, execute, and evaluate a health improvement project that is important to their communities. Specifically, fellows participated in IHI’s Improvement Coach Professional Development program and received individual mentoring to build their leadership and advocacy skills. Throughout the year, fellows were able to participate in a range of workshops, forums, online courses, and seminars to learn techniques on developing innovative solutions for and overcoming barriers to community health improvement. Over the course of the program, fellows were able to present their projects and results to date to receive real-time feedback and suggestions for accelerating progress. Fellows were able to use the skills they have learned to lead future improvement initiatives in their communities.