Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a decision support tool intended to present timely, evidence-based recommendations to decision makers in all sections of society in order to accentuate potential positive health and well-being impacts (and mitigate potential negative impacts) of policies, plans (including local and neighbourhood plans), programmes and projects (including infrastructure and loca...

A recent editorial in this journal provides a summary of key economic, social, and public health considerations of the forthcoming legislation to legalize, regulate, and restrict access to marijuana in Canada. As our government plans to implement an evidence-based public health framework for marijuana legalization, we reflect and expand on recent discussions of the public health implications of...

OBJECTIVES This study uses critical realist methodology to identify the essential and contingent elements of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) and Healthy Public Policy (HPP) as operationalised by practitioners. DESIGN Data collection-qualitative interviews and a workshop were conducted with HIA and HPP practitioners working in differing contexts. DATA ANALYSIS Critical realist analytical ques...

OBJECTIVES Malocclusion, though not life-threatening, has vast impact on individual's social interactions and self-esteem. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to assess whether orthodontic treatment of adolescents with malocclusion had any association with their oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL). METHODS The subjects for this study were recruited at a state-funded universit...

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been a strong and persistent voice calling for the recognition of the role of health in development and of the impact of socio-economic development on health. Health impact assessment (HIA) is one mechanism that can be used to achieve this goal. The objective of this paper is to describe HIA practice in the WHO European Healthy Cities Network and present ...

INTRODUCTION AND PURPOSE Wearing orthodontic appliances may negatively affect a patient's oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) physiologically, psychologically, and socially. Few studies have assessed the effect of palatal expanders on OHRQoL. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of palatal expanders on OHRQoL and to compare it with that of fixed orthodontic appliances. MA...

BACKGROUND The oral health-related quality of life indicators are increasingly used to measure the impact of the oral conditions on quality of life. One of the most used indicators is the Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP-14), but it has never been applied in Iran. The aim of this study was to validate the usage of OHIP-14 among Iranians. METHODS A cross-sectional study was performed in Kerman...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to explore the patterns of health services utilization among adults with chronic and complex physical disabilities of childhood, specifically cerebral palsy, spina bifida, and acquired brain injuries.METHODS. A cohort of 345 young adults who had graduated from the Bloorview MacMillan Children's Centre was identified. Their health care records were extracted...

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...