BASIC CONCEPTS It has long been recognised that health and its determinants are strongly influenced by policies outside the healthcare sector, for example, transport, regeneration projects, and housing. In recent years, several countries have introduced health impact assessment (HIA) to try and ensure that potential effects on health are taken into account. It involves identifying disbenefits a...

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Transportation decisions have health consequences that are often not incorporated into policy-making processes. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a process that can be used to evaluate health effects of transportation policy. We present a rapid HIA, conducted over eight weeks, evaluating health and economic effects of proposed fare increases and service cuts to Boston, Massachusetts' public tra...

The health of populations depends on many different factors. Epidemiology is a discipline that has a crucial role in describing health status, identifying risk factors, and analyzing relationships between health and different hazardous agents. The classical epidemiological triangle of host-agentenvironment describes how individuals become ill. Disease occurs when an outside agent (vector) capab...

Within the discipline of health promotion there has been long-standing understanding of the social determinants of health and life expectancy.1-3 There is also long-standing evidence of the unfair, unjust distribution of these resources within and among societies. It has proven difficult to translate this evidence of the need for the fairer distribution of socially-distributed resources into po...

INTRODUCTION Since the 1990s, the use of health impact assessments (HIAs) has grown for considering the potential health impacts of proposed policies, plans, programs, and projects in various sectors. Evaluation of HIA impacts is needed for understanding the value of HIAs, improving the methods involved in HIAs, and potentially expanding their application. Impact evaluations examine whether HIA...

Richard Seymour was appointed the first Inspector of Nuisances in Sydney in 1884. His work approving and inspecting opium dens, privies, abattoirs and tanneries contained many of the elements we now call health impact assessment (HIA). Indeed the entire corpus of planning and environmental protection legislation and the building codes have encoded provisions which are a distillation of the accu...

This paper reports the conclusions of a recent workshop that was established to discuss how health impact assessments (HIAs) might be evaluated. The main purposes of HIA are: (a) to predict the consequences of different decisions; (b) to make the decision-making process more open by involving stakeholders; and (c) to inform the decision makers. 'Prediction', 'participation' and 'informing decis...