Health impact assessment

Citizen Participation in Health Impact Assessment: An Overview of the Principal Arguments Supporting It

One of the mandates of the National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy (NCCHPP) is to inform Canadian public health practitioners about effective strategies for promoting the adoption of healthy public policies. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) currently represents one of the most structured practices available to public health actors. It is applied to policies developed by sectors other than that of health that can significantly affect health determinants. This fact sheet focuses on one of the methodological aspects of implementing health impact assessments, namely the role that can be assigned to citizen participation.

Citizen Participation in Health Impact Assessment: An Overview of the Risks and Obstacles

One of the mandates of the National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy (NCCHPP) is to inform Canadian public health practitioners about effective strategies for promoting the adoption of healthy public policies. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) currently represents one of the most structured practices available to public health actors. It is applied to policies developed by sectors other than that of health that can significantly affect health determinants. This fact sheet focuses on one of the methodological aspects of implementing health impact assessments, namely the role that can be assigned to citizen participation.

The Implementation of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) in Canada: HIA Pilot Project in Montérégie, Québec

Health impact assessment (HIA) figures among the practices that encourage the adoption of healthy public policies. The HIA approach is a structured series of steps designed to determine the potential effects, both negative and positive, of a project or policy on a population’s health and well-being. HIAs are generally prospective in nature, meaning that they attempt to estimate the future impacts of a policy in order to inform decision makers before decisions are made and policies implemented. They generally address policies developed outside the health sector.

Several models exist for applying the HIA approach. Depending on the purpose of the assessment, the approach may place more emphasis on finding scientific data, encouraging public participation and strengthening local communities, or supporting intersectoral decision making. The HIA pilot project carried out in Montérégie falls more within this last model of practice, which is also the approach adopted at the provinci…

Four Types of Impact Assessment Used in Canada

Prospective impact assessment of projects, programs and policies has occurred in Canada since 1974, when a federal Cabinet policy was developed to review the environmental impacts of federal decisions. Today, various types of impact assessment are practised in Canada and abroad, in order to identify the unintended effects of public- and private-sector initiatives on human health and/or on the environment.

The existence of a large variety of impact assessments has led to a certain amount of confusion (Rattle, 2009), as there are no definite separations between approaches. For example, Environmental Impact Assessments may (or may not) evaluate impact on human health or on the social determinants of health; Health Impact Assessments may (or may not) address issues of equity, while Equity-focused Health Impact Assessments explicitly evaluate this dimension.

The objective of this table is to clarify four different approaches that are used in Canada: Health Impact Assessme…

What is Health Impact Assessment (HIA)?

The most common definition of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is the one set forth by the European Office of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1999 in what is known as the “Gothenburg consensus paper.” HIA is presented as “a combination of procedures, methods and tools by which a policy, program or project may be judged as to its potential effects on the health of a population, and the distribution of those effects within the population” (WHO Regional Office for Europe, 1999).

The application of HIA to policies is supported by a social model of health which assumes that the health of a population is closely tied to the conditions in which people live and work and that these conditions are influenced by decisions made in all government sectors (Whitehead & Dahlgren, 1991). HIA also rests on the idea that all sectors are responsible for the health of the population. Thus, HIA is generally applied to policies, programs and projects developed in sectors other than health…

Radon in Québec Evaluation of the health risk and critical analysis of intervention strategies

This document should not be thought of as the end point in the process of managing radon-related risks. Instead, it is more a first milestone. We believe that it will allow public authorities to continue this process on more precise foundations. The document presents the state of knowledge and critically reviews the different intervention options. It does not present a detailed program, but instead a process for the gradual implementation of different interventions.