The Neighborhood as a Unit of Change for Health: Early Findings from the East Harlem Neighborhood Health Action Center.

Place-based approaches have been promoted as one way to reduce health inequities by addressing community-level factors that shape health, such as housing quality, healthcare systems, the built environment, and social capital. In 2016-2017, the NYC Health Department's Center for Health Equity launched three Neighborhood Health Action Centers (Action Centers), which use a place-based approach to improve health in neighborhoods with disproportionate burdens of premature mortality. We describe this approach and the genesis of the Action Centers.

A Place-Based Community Health Worker Program: Feasibility and Early Outcomes, New York City, 2015.

Introduction: This study examined feasibility of a place-based community health worker (CHW) and health advocate (HA) initiative in five public housing developments selected for high chronic disease burden and described early outcomes.

Methods: This intervention was informed by a mixed-method needs assessment performed December 2014-January 2015 (representative telephone survey, n=1,663; six focus groups, n=55). Evaluation design was a non-randomized, controlled quasi-experiment.