appointed Martin as commissioner<\/a> of the city\u2019s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene at the end of January.\u00a0<\/p>\nWhat You Need To Know<\/p>\n
Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u00a0appointed Dr. Alister Martin as commissioner\u00a0of the city\u2019s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene at the end of January
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As an appointee of Mamdani, Martin says he’s taking the agency’s helm with a hand on deck to address the city\u2019s affordability crisis
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He says the agency will also aim to make its public health guidance\u00a0more tangible for New Yorkers, particularly in its fight against health disparities<\/p>\n
During his first one-on-one interview, the city’s new top doctor acknowledged he’s got a lot to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked about the mixed messages about health coming from the federal government and social media, Martin said, \u201cWhen federal leadership steps back, we in the city are going to step up.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re going to help to make sure that we make it clear for New Yorkers what the correct public health guidance is, what the public education needs to be, what the vaccine guidance needs to be,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
That will continue, he said, the job the department is already doing \u2014 but the agency is aiming to make its guidance more tangible for New Yorkers, particularly in its fight against health disparities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a mantle he says he will assume even in the face of federal funding cuts to diversity and equity services.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have pretty specific evidence that the federal government is not a fan of the work that we’re doing on equity, and the reality is we’re not gonna stop doing that work on equity,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it’s going to be my job and this department’s job to put ourselves in a position to continue to lead in case the federal government comes and messes with our money.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
As an appointee of Mamdani, Martin also takes the health department\u2019s helm with a hand on deck to address the city\u2019s affordability crisis.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For him, he says it\u2019s personal, as his new job is a homecoming of sorts. He lived in Jackson Heights, Queens with his mother when he was a young child.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cQuite frankly, it became unaffordable for my mom even back then,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so we moved at the time, back then, to Jersey.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked how he would reorient the department to provide public health through an affordability lens, Martin said, \u201cThe problems that we want to meaningfully begin to address are things like the coming procedural disenrollment wave when it comes to Medicaid.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHelping people make sure that they know that their renewals are coming. The mayor’s been clear on his work on housing and preventing evictions,” he said. \u201cAnd to the extent that we can, we’re going to play a coordinating role, because we have hundreds of thousands of patients that come through our clinics every single year.”<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd so while people are there, if we screen them, we find out that they’ve got a landlord that sucks, quite frankly. Or if they’ve got a situation that’s not safe, we’re going to help connect them to Right-to-Counsel<\/a>,” he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Out of one storm, into the next: Dr. Alister Martin\u2019s first day on the job was during New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2952,25,54129,2953,9,24,55,54,12,56,27,200],"class_list":["post-149697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-app-health","tag-app-top-stories","tag-erin-billups-national-health-reporter","tag-health","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-news","tag-ny","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}