Recent Advances in Health Impact Assessment and Health in All Policies Implementation: Lessons from an International Convening in Barcelona.

Health Impact Assessment (HIA) and Health in All Policies (HiAP) are policy tools used to include health considerations in decision-making processes across sectors such as transportation, education, and criminal justice that can play a role in improving health and equity. This article summarizes proceedings from an international convening of HIA and HiAP experts held in July 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. The presentations and panel discussions included different models, best practices, and lessons learned, including from government, international banks, think tanks, and academia. Participants discussed ideas from around the world for cross-sector collaboration to advance health. The convening covered the following topics: community engagement, building greater understanding of and support for HiAP, and exploring how mandates for HIA and HiAP approaches may advance health and equity.

Optimizing the health benefits of climate change policies using health impact assessment.

Health impact assessment (HIA) is a tool that can be used to examine the potential health impacts of proposed climate change policies and offer recommendations to promote health and mitigate adverse health consequences of such policies. We used an HIA database, a literature search, and expert consultation to identify 12 HIAs of the proposed climate change policies from six states in the U.S. These policies included cap-and-trade legislation, heat-wave and sea-level-rise mitigation and adaptation, transportation policy impacts of climate change, carbon-reduction strategy scenarios, soil- and water-conservation strategies, urban forest canopy for climate adaptation, overheating buildings, and regional transportation plan and sustainable communities strategies. In four descriptive summaries, we found that HIAs foster stakeholder engagement and provide useful health-promoting recommendations. HIAs can facilitate cross-sector collaboration, help optimize the health co-benefits of climate change policies, and raise awareness among decision makers of health impacts of those proposed policies.

A simplified framework for incorporating health into community development initiatives.

Community development seeks to address the consequences of poverty through initiatives that improve housing, economic opportunity, service availability, and community capacity. There is growing recognition that the fields of community development and public health have much in common with regard to target populations, objectives, and challenges. Individual and neighborhood-level poverty are well-documented risk factors for illness and premature death. But relatively few developers systematically analyze how their projects could affect the health of the target community. Tools and metrics that facilitate incorporating health into planning, financing, and implementing new community development projects and programs will foster more widespread and productive collaboration between these two fields. We propose a simple framework to facilitate the identification and measurement of potential health effects, actions to optimize anticipated positive impacts, and strategies to mitigate potential negative impacts. The framework is drawn from an analysis of health impact assessments and includes four elements: identifying the health status of the population served, considering neighborhood-level influences on health, building design features important to health, and incorporating community engagement and capacity-building activities into the initiative.