YMCA's Diabetes Prevention Program

Documents 
Expansion Release
Forum Agenda
Forum Transcript
Forum Panelists

Photos 
Ann Albright, CDC
Ursula Bauer, CDC
Tom Beauregard, UHG
Bernadette Boden-Albala, Columbia
Matt Longjohn, YMCA
Jack Lund, YMCA
Gina Murdoch, ADA
Judy Ouziel, YMCA
Laurel Pickering, NBGH

Links
nyc.ydiabetes.com

YMCA Galvanizes Public-Private Community Partnership Committed to Diabetes Prevention

Y Community Forum on Diabetes Prevention Marked Citywide Expansion of the YMCA Diabetes Prevention Program, a Community-Based Approach Proven to Reduce the Risk of Developing Diabetes by More Than Half

New York, NY (March 23, 2011) - In recognition of the American Diabetes Association’s nationwide Diabetes Alert Day, the YMCA of Greater New York hosted a Y Community Forum on Diabetes Prevention to raise awareness of the citywide diabetes epidemic and offer community-based solutions to prevent the disease.

“The Preventable Epidemic: Community-Based Solutions for Tackling Prediabetes” gathered an impressive panel of thought leaders from academia and public policy, business and health care, to address the challenges involved in reaching the roughly 1.4 million adult New Yorkers with prediabetes in order to help prevent them from developing the potentially deadly disease.

The event marked the official citywide expansion of the YMCA’s Diabetes Prevention Program (YDPP), a 16-session group behavior change class that helps people at high risk for developing type 2 diabetes avoid the disease through healthy eating, increased activity and other positive lifestyle changes. The program is based on the original U.S. Diabetes Prevention Program, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which showed that with lifestyle changes and 5-percent weight reduction, a person with prediabetes can prevent or delay the onset of type 2 diabetes by 58 percent. 

The Y Community Forum, introduced by Jack Lund, president and CEO of the YMCA of Greater New York, and moderated by Matt Longjohn, MD, MPH, Senior Director of Chronic Disease Prevention for YMCA of the USA, featured as keynote speaker Ursula E. Bauer, PhD, MPH, Director, CDC National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. A common theme among all the esteemed panelists was the importance of public-private collaboration in tackling this community-based health epidemic and the important role New York City plays in terms of scaling the program nationally through leading by example.

Selected speaker highlights follow.

JACK LUND, President & CEO, YMCA of Greater New York
“When nearly one in four adult New Yorkers have prediabetes and 93 percent of them don’t even know it, it’s not an understatement to say that intervention now can truly save lives. We think our YMCA is positioned to be part of a new healthcare delivery system that values prevention and that this public, private and not-for-profit collaboration is truly a significant step toward improving the public’s health, it will save healthcare dollars, and it will save lives.”

URSULA E. BAUER
Director, CDC National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
“Expanding coverage and access to the Diabetes Prevention Program through community and clinical partnerships is a systems change that reaches into the community, puts health in the people’s hands, and averts disease, improves quality of life, and reduces healthcare costs, bringing us closer to fulfilling the promise of our nation to promote the public good and helping us address the chronic disease crisis we find ourselves in. Partnerships such as the YMCA and UnitedHealth Group are essential to our success, and CDC is proud to be part of it. Community programs such as the Diabetes Prevention Program will become yet more proof of the principle that prevention does work at the community level and can work on a national scale.”

ANN ALBRIGHT, PhD, RD
Director, CDC Division of Diabetes Translation
“We now are at almost 80 million people in the country that have this condition that is putting them at risk for developing diabetes. The good news? It’s something we can do something about. . . There’s plenty of work to do, we need health professionals, we need lay workers, we need business, we need the private sector. . . The Y and UnitedHealth Group are the inaugural participants and bravo, kudos to those who step up to the plate first. They were the brave ones to come up and say, ‘You know what? We really want to do this.’ . . . Our goal at CDC—and it is an audacious goal—is by 2020 to have 15 million have had access to this program. The Y has projected that they can reach about six million of those people. So, clearly, we need others to come onboard.”

LYNN SILVER, MD, MPH
Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Chronic Disease Prevention and Control
NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
“For almost a decade we have known that it is possible to prevent or delay most cases of diabetes through programs such as the Diabetes Prevention Program, but our healthcare system has failed to implement those solutions up until now. ,It has paid freely for medications, for dialysis, for the amputations but we have not made that investment to prevent people at risk from moving onto diabetes with relatively simply interventions like talking to people and helping them become physically active and reduce their risks. It’s time for that to change. This collaboration between the Y, the CDC, UnitedHealth Group, and ourselves represents an exciting movement that can start to turn this situation around.”

JUDY OUZIEL
Sr. Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives, YMCA of Greater New York
“The Y is in a very unique position that it has its arms around so many communities in so many places in New York City. The ability to roll this program out and treat people in a personal, relaxed setting is really magic. And I believe, as do my colleagues, that we can do this and we can be successful... Our lifestyle coaches have the ability to go anywhere in the community, wherever the community leads us.”

GINA MURDOCH
Executive Director, American Diabetes Association, Greater New York
“We’re thrilled that we’re having this event on Diabetes Alert Day. It really is an opportunity to draw attention to the need to have people take the risk test and determine their risk for developing diabetes and prediabetes... They may not realize that they have diabetes until they’re into a complications situation and the disease has had years to progress and to affect them. And so getting people to know whether they have diabetes, if they’re at risk, is certainly an important point of combating those blind spots.”

TOM BEAUREGARD
Executive Director, UnitedHealth Center for Health Reform & Modernization
“We’re encouraging all payers to [participate in the program]. And, in fact, we’re offering the Prevention Program the identification model and then the platform that we’ve created to actually administer this to all other payers. . . We’ll offer this through another health plan, we’ll offer it to an employer that doesn’t, in fact, offer United insurance, and that’s just how strongly we feel about the need to disseminate this.”

LAUREL PICKERING, MPH
Executive Director, Northeast Business Group on Health
“Our members are increasingly concerned with the health of their employees,” said . “The companies that we represent in particular are at risk for the health of their employees—they actually pay for health services as they are used by employees and dependents. And they’re beginning to recognize, finally, that they really need to address the underlying cause of disease and health issues to impact their healthcare costs. . . We want to be sending common messages as employers which are being reinforced in the community and at home, and hopefully, keeping the person at risk for diabetes or with prediabetes on track. So they’re getting reinforced messages at work, supported by their health plan, and reinforced again in the community at a place like the YMCA.”

BERNADETTE BODEN-ALBALA, MPH, DrPH
Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences in Neurology
Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health
“When we think about the future of public health... we need to make sure that all of our students are trained, not just to know that these are bad diseases but are trained to interact with the community. Dissemination is what communities want. But they just don’t want information thrown at them. They want it explained. . . When you disseminate, two things will happen: People will say, ‘That’s not going to work here, but you know what? Why don’t you try this?’ And the second thing that’s going to happen is people are going to talk to other people about it, and you’re going to get these great social networks that are going to be ready to do this.”