background many countries conduct health impact assessment (hia) of their projects and policies to predict their positive and negative health impacts. in recent years many guides have been developed to inform hia practice, largely reflecting local developments in hia. these guides have often been designed for specific contexts and specific need, making the choice between guides difficult. the o...

health impact assessment (hia) is a relatively young field of endeavour, and hence, future progress will depend on the planning, implementation and rigorous evaluation of additional hias of projects, programmes and policies the world over. in the june 2014 issue of the international journal of health policy and management, fakhri and colleagues investigated underlying principles of hia through ...

27 Introduction The concept of Health in All Policies aims to improve the health outcomes associated with policies in an attempt to mitigate health disparities and provide optimal environments for healthier living. This multidisciplinary framework seeks to improve health through effective assessment and reformation of policy for organizations of any level and stature. The importance of integrat...

The World Health Organization has promoted health impact assessment (HIA) for over 20 years. At the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), HIA was discussed as a critical method for linking health to "green economy" and "institutional framework" strategies for sustainable development. In countries having a high human development index (HDI), HIA has been added to th...

OBJECTIVE To describe the main differences between conducting a rapid health impact assessment (HIA) and an intermediate HIA on foreshore development plans and their feasibility from a health service perspective. METHODS A rapid HIA and an intermediate HIA were undertaken on two foreshore development plans. RESULTS The main differences between the two HIAs were in the identification, assess...

Health impact assessment (HIA) can ensure that health is a core element of sustainable urban planning. Based on the experience of the NSW HIA Project, we discuss the current strengths of HIA and challenges facing it as an urban sustainability tool across five areas: the use of evidence; integrating HIA with environmental impact assessments; including consideration of equity; recognising wider d...

BACKGROUND Currently, no standard tool is publicly available that allows researchers or policy-makers to quantify the impact of policies using epidemiological evidence within the causal framework of Health Impact Assessment (HIA). A standard tool should comply with three technical criteria (real-life population, dynamic projection, explicit risk-factor states) and three usability criteria (mode...

At the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) submitted a briefing paper on the important contribution impact assessment (IA) can make to carrying out the agenda for sustainable development (1). The paper emphasizes the need to make human health and safety an integral part of the impact assessment of policies, plans, and, of course, d...

Health impact assessment (HIA)--a combination of methods to examine formally the potential health effects of a proposed policy, program, or project--has received considerable interest over the past decade internationally as a practical mechanism for collaborating with other sectors to address the environmental determinants of health and to achieve more effectively the goals of population health...

The nine health impact assessment (HIA) case studies in this issue represent a considerable contribution to the HIA literature and provide a number of lessons. These lessons include the value of using evidence in HIA to aid decision-making; the various forms that stakeholder and community involvement in HIA can take; and the fact that HIA can act as a catalyst for intersectoral engagement. They...