Health impact assessment

One of the mandates of the National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy (NCCHPP) is to inform Canadian public health practitioners about effective strategies for promoting the adoption of healthy public policies. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) currently represents one of the most structured practices available to public health actors. It is applied to policies developed by sectors other than that of health that can significantly affect health determinants. This fact sheet focuses…

One of the mandates of the National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy (NCCHPP) is to inform Canadian public health practitioners about effective strategies for promoting the adoption of healthy public policies. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) currently represents one of the most structured practices available to public health actors. It is applied to policies developed by sectors other than that of health that can significantly affect health determinants. This fact sheet focuses…

Health impact assessment (HIA) figures among the practices that encourage the adoption of healthy public policies. The HIA approach is a structured series of steps designed to determine the potential effects, both negative and positive, of a project or policy on a population’s health and well-being. HIAs are generally prospective in nature, meaning that they attempt to estimate the future impacts of a policy in order to inform decision makers before decisions are made and policies…

Prospective impact assessment of projects, programs and policies has occurred in Canada since 1974, when a federal Cabinet policy was developed to review the environmental impacts of federal decisions. Today, various types of impact assessment are practised in Canada and abroad, in order to identify the unintended effects of public- and private-sector initiatives on human health and/or on the environment.

The existence of a large variety of impact assessments has led to a certain…

The most common definition of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is the one set forth by the European Office of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1999 in what is known as the “Gothenburg consensus paper.” HIA is presented as “a combination of procedures, methods and tools by which a policy, program or project may be judged as to its potential effects on the health of a population, and the distribution of those effects within the population” (WHO Regional Office for Europe, 1999).

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This document should not be thought of as the end point in the process of managing radon-related risks. Instead, it is more a first milestone. We believe that it will allow public authorities to continue this process on more precise foundations. The document presents the state of knowledge and critically reviews the different intervention options. It does not present a detailed program, but instead a process for the gradual implementation of different interventions.