HEALTH IMPACT ASSESSMENT

Health Impact Assessment



Health Impact Assessment

Introduction

HIA is Interventions Implemented by governments very frequently related to the Determinants of health. Health impact assessment (HIA) is Used as a predictive tool to include health in no health policymaking. This paper defines HIA; describe STI Methods, Procedures and Applications, and Discusses Opportunities and Challenges associated with HIA. HIA Has Been Used in Different kinds of policies (transports, urban regeneration, culture, etc Energy Development.), At Different levels (local, national, European) and in Many countries, Scarce STI Despite use in Spain, HIA Allows to consider health sector in policymaking, social Taking Into account Inequalities in health, so public Policies That Can Be Healthier designed, On the Other Hand, HIA is a tool under Methodological Development Hindered Which use is due to the Existing narrow biomedical perspective on the Determinants of health, and to the Difficulties in working in public policy-making with multi-scrotal and participatory perspectives.

Key Characteristics

Two key characteristics define HIAs:

Predicting the consequences of project-related actions

Providing information that can help decision makers prioritize prevention and control strategies throughout the project cycle

HIA Functions

Overall, the HIA process can contribute to the following:

Predicting the consequences of different project- related options

Providing information required to help prioritize prevention and control strategies throughout the project cycle

Serving as a vehicle to engage companies and key stakeholders in a collaborative decision-making process

Identifying the most critical environmental and social determinants of health that may be affected by the project

Addressing health issues that may influence overall sustainability objectives

Facilitating intersectional collaboration beyond the health sector and capacity building with local, regional, and national host-country health resources

Enhancing the project “license to operate” in the eyes of local communities and the host government.

The HIA Process

In the field of policy making, HIA comes from the tradition of using systematic methods of assessment for the design of interventions. The initial focus of the 1960, too focused on the financial costs, gave way in the decade following the environmental impact assessment. The need to consider health as part of such assessments developed the EIS, which in turn is closely related to other impact assessments (social, human and gender), who study the various consequences that public actions. In parallel, the program "Health for all in the XXI century", the World Health Organization (WHO), drew the framework for a model of social policy development in which health was a factor and a key result taken into account.

More recently, the strategy of the Healthy Cities Network of WHO stated in its fourth phase (2003-2008) the application of HIA as a tool for intersectional action for health promotion and reducing inequalities. In Europe, some milestones that should be mentioned include the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), which considered the need to examine the impact of major European policies on health the publication in 2006, under the Finnish Presidency of the report "Health in all Policies', which aims to integrate health into all EU policies in an effective and systematic and the ...