Second National Health Impact Assessment Meeting Begins Today
Building on the success of the Inaugural Health Impact Assessment (HIA) meeting held in April 2012, leading HIA stakeholders including the Health Impact Project—a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts—and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) convened the second national HIA meeting today, in Washington D.C.
>> Follow the real-time Twitter conversation about the conference with the hashtag #NatHIA13.
An HIA is a tool that helps evaluate the potential health effects of a plan, project or policy before it is built or implemented. It can provide recommendations to increase positive health outcomes and minimize adverse health outcomes. It can also bring potential public health impacts and considerations to the decision-making process for plans, projects and policies that fall outside the traditional public health arenas, such as transportation and land use.
While HIAs have been conducted for decades, their wider use has become more common in just the last few years. According to the Health Impact Project, more than 200 HIAs have been conducted in the United States on issues as diverse as transportation, economic policy and climate change.
NewPublicHealth has created a short HIA resource list with links to background information on health impact assessments.
- Health Impact Assessment posts on NewPublicHealth
- HIA Issue Brief from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
- HIA in the United States, a map from the Health Impact Project
- An HIA Infographic from the Health Impact Project
- CDC’s Healthy Places collection of HIA information
- CDC Resource on HIAs and Public Policy Development
- The World Health Organization HIA site