BACKGROUND Policies that empower individuals and communities may be appropriate for public health, and more broadly. Simple, transparent and acceptable tools are therefore required to evaluate policies from an empowerment perspective. In 2008, the South African Department of Health (DOHSA) drafted a policy to endorse the integration of African Traditional Medicine (ATM) into the public health s...

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...

Industrial Safety and Health Law (ISH Law) of Japan requires abnormalities identified in evaluations of worker health and working environments are reported to occupational physicians, and employers are advised of measures to ensure appropriate accommodations in working environments and work procedures. Since the 1980s, notions of a risk assessment and occupational safety and health management s...

Since the 1990s, health policy makers in Finland have been supportive of evidence-based medicine and approaches to implement its results. The Finnish Office for Health Technology Assessment (Finohta) has grown from a small start in 1995 to a medium-sized health technology assessment (HTA) agency, with special responsibility in providing assessments to underpin national policies in screening. Ex...

The conference on “Policy Evaluation in Innovation and Technology” on which this volume is based was organised in the context of the OECD work on “best practices in innovation and technology policy”. Its aim was to bring together policy practitioners from OECD Member countries with researchers working on evaluation issues in order to present and compare different experiences in policy evaluatio...

OBJECTIVES Local government services and policies affect health determinants across many sectors such as planning, transportation, housing and leisure. Researchers and policymakers have argued that decisions affecting wider determinants of health, well-being and inequalities should be informed by evidence. This study explores how information and evidence are defined, assessed and utilised by lo...

Trust and policies are going to play a crucial role in enabling the potential of many web applications. Policies are a well-known approach to protecting security and privacy of users in the context of the Semantic Web: in the last years a number of policy languages were proposed to address different application scenarios. The first part of this chapter provides a broad overview of the research ...