The Interpretive Visualization (IVIS) Group at the Division of Biomedical Communications, Dept. of Surgery, University of Toronto has developed a visually-oriented, Internet-based Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course on Sentinel Node Biopsy. The site design methodology involved an extensive needs assessment, iterative formative evaluations of site and media design, a summative evalu...

The most important public health priority in agricultural policy-making is currently food safety, despite the relatively higher importance of food security, nutrition, and other agricultural-related health issues in terms of global burden of disease. There is limited experience worldwide of using health impact assessment (HIA) during the development of agriculture and food policies, which perha...

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...

OBJECTIVE To compare effectiveness of patient care in hospital at home scheme with hospital care. DESIGN Pragmatic randomised controlled trial. SETTING Leicester hospital at home scheme and the city's three acute hospitals. PARTICIPANTS 199 consecutive patients referred to hospital at home by their general practitioner and assessed as being suitable for admission. Six of 102 patients rand...

We used Health Impact Assessment (HIA) to analyze the impact on a given population's health outcomes in terms of all-causes mortality and respiratory and cardiovascular hospitalizations attributable to short-term exposure to particulate matter less than 10 μm diameter (PM10) in Bejaia city, for which health effects of air pollution have never been investigated. Two scenarios of PM10 reduction w...

Public policy decisions in both the social and economic spheres have enormous impact on global public health. As a result of this, and of the skewed global distribution of power and resources, health impact assessment (HIA) potentially has a key role to play in foreign policy-making and global public policy-making. Governments, multilateral bodies and transnational corporations need to be held ...

Since the Lalonde Report in 1974 on ‘‘health beyond health care’’ in Canada, awareness of non-health sector determinants of health has been increasing (1). The World health report 2000 proposed population health as a central objective of health care systems (2) but there are few signs of the concrete mechanisms for intersectoral action that this requires. In 2000, at the Fifth Global Conference...

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...

Alcohol-related health outcomes show strikingly high incidence in Hungary. The effects of alcohol consumption are influenced not only by the quantity, but also the quality of drinks; therefore, wine production can have an important effect on public health outcomes. Nevertheless, the Hungarian wine sector faces several vital problems and challenges influenced by the country's accession to the Eu...

Study objective: To estimate the relative health effects of the income and health insurance provisions of the Los Angeles City living wage ordinance. Setting and participants: About 10000 employees of city contractors are subject to the Los Angeles City living wage ordinance, which establishes an annually adjusted minimum wage ($7.99 per hour in July 2002) and requires employers to contribute $...