boosting advocacy with health impact assessments

7/27/2019 Boosting Advocacy with Health Impact Assessments

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Boosting Advocacy withHealth Impact AssessmentsAlliance for Biking & Walking Mutual Aid CallWednesday, September 11, 2013

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The National ResearchCouncil defnes HIAs

with six steps.

qualitative data, HIA practitioners analyze the potential health impact. Stakeholderengagement throughout is important.

4. Develop recommendations Practitioners developa set o proposals to maximize health. An HIA may recommend ways to lower negative impacts or enhancepositive ones. It may recommend against a project alto-gether, or make suggestions on how to alter a policy to maximize health. Its importantthat recommendations be actionable, realistic and site-speci c. HIAs can also includea health plan to show how implementers can manage the health implications even a erthe decision has been made.

5. Reporting HIA practitioners communicate their process, ndings and recommenda-tions. Tis may entail di erent ormats or di erent stakeholder groups. HIAs should bemade publicly available to serve as a resource or the public and or other HIA practi-tioners.

6. Evaluation & monitoring Tere are three types o evaluation: Process How well was HIA conducted? Practitioners can ask people who were

involved how well they thought it went and identi y areas to improve. Tis is espe-cially important i the practitioners want to do other HIAs with other groups.

Impact Did your HIA infuence the decision? Outcome Practitioners try to determine whether the decision had the suspected

health outcome. Tis step is important to growing Health Impact Assessments by providing in ormation on how public health practitioners are impacting decisions.But its also very hard to do many policies, programs, projects or plans can takemany years to have an e ect.

Advice from Don KostelecPrincipal, Kostelec Planning, LLC

Lessons from performing HIAs Silo-busting and cross-sector collaboration are important components o HIAs. Te

health people get to meet the planning people and work together. While the message is almost always positive or health/active transportation assess-

ments, dont be a raid to identi y and address potential negative impacts and infuences.Tey do exist, and HIA is a great method to e ectively address them.

Its important to work with partners throughout an HIA. For an HIA about a bicycleplan in Haywood County, NC, Kostelec partnered with Healthy Heywood to use BMIdata in the assessment. Although the BMI in ormation was proprietary, the HIA prac-titioners were able to weight their HIA with BMI data without directly reporting thenumbers.

Funding or an HIA can come rom public unds or grant money. In Haywood County,
http://www.kostelecplanning.com/http://http://www.kostelecplanning.com/http://


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boosting advocacy with health impact assessments

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