OBJECTIVE To describe the use and reporting of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) in Australia and New Zealand between 2005 and 2009. METHODS We identified 115 HIAs undertaken in Australia and New Zealand between 2005 and 2009. We reviewed 55 HIAs meeting the study's inclusion criteria to identify characteristics and appraise the quality of the reports. RESULTS Of the 55 HIAs, 31 were undertake...

OBJECTIVE The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) is a recently concluded free trade agreement involving Australia and 11 other Pacific-rim nations, which has the potential for far-reaching impacts on public health. A health impact assessment (HIA) was carried out during the negotiations to determine the potential future public health impact in Australia and to provide recommendations to ...

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...

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...

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 ...

The concept, techniques, and applications of health impact assessment (HIA) hold promise to raise the profi le of health within the overall project, policy and programme planning, and assessment cycle. HIA in the public sector has progressed over the past two decades with a strong Eurocentric focus on transportation and social programmes and policies. In 1999, the publication of the Gothenburg ...

European Union (EU) Member States are interested in using health impact assessment (HIA) as a means of safeguarding their obligations to protect human health under the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam. However, several have encountered difficulties institutionalizing HIA with the policy-making process. As a consequence, the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe has suggested coupli...

The importance to public health of environmental decisions-including those about land use, transportation, power generation, agriculture, and environmental regulation-is increasingly well documented. Yet many decision makers in fields not traditionally focused on health continue to pay little if any attention to the important health effects of their work. This article examines the emerging prac...

Health impact assessment (HIA) is both an effective tool for promoting healthy public policies and one that has the potential to help hold accountable for their actions those who create unhealthy public policies. This article identifies some of the issues that arise in considering the application of HIA to the operation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), especially in the context of sub-...

BACKGROUND Consideration of health impacts of non-health sector policies has been encouraged in many countries, with health impact assessment (HIA) increasingly used worldwide for this purpose. HIA aims to assess the potential impacts of a proposal and make recommendations to improve the potential health outcomes and minimize inequalities. Although many of the same techniques can be used, such ...