Nation’s largest public health system and the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City awarded $1.5 million from the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund to expand programs serving health care staff, patients, and communities in sites across the City. Expansion includes initiatives to use the arts as a resource to promote employee wellness and resilience and to combat compassion fatigue.
Feb 27, 2019, New York, NY
Joined by New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray and NYC Health + Hospitals leadership—the philanthropist Laurie M. Tisch announced today at a news conference a $1.5 million grant via the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City to launch the public health system’s Arts in Medicine program. The program will introduce new initiatives benefiting staff and patients at hospitals, community health centers, and long-term care facilities, as well as support broader adoption of initiatives that have worked at a single site. The news conference was held at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue.
The grant is provided through the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund’s Arts in Health initiative, which supports organizations using the arts to address health issues affecting New Yorkers, with particular attention to increasing access to care and addressing disparities in health outcomes. The three-year grant to NYC Health + Hospitals, which is the largest municipal health system in the country and serves approximately 1.1 million New Yorkers annually, will significantly expand the public health system’s arts programs. Beyond serving patients, the Arts in Medicine program will create new initiatives aimed at staff as a means to reduce stress, support emotional health, and help address “compassion fatigue,” historically known as “physician burnout.”