“The social determinants of health are the circumstances in which people are born,grow up, live, work and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness. These circumstances are in turn shaped by a wider set of forces: economics, social policies, and politics” (World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health [CSDH WHO], 2016).

“The underlying social structures and processes that systematically assign people to different social positions and distribute the social determinants of health unequally in society are the social determinants of health inequities” (VicHealth, 2015, p. 6).

This paper is part of a series of short documents based on the longer Briefing Note, Policy Approaches to Reducing Health...

This briefing note belongs to a series on the various models used in political science to represent public policy development processes. Note that the purpose of these briefing notes is not to refine an existing model. Our purpose is rather to suggest how each of these models constitutes a useful interpretive lens that can guide reflection and action leading to the production of healthy public policies.

In addition to the news or to unforeseen events that may arise daily, policy makers have to grapple with a multiplicity of evolving demands coming from numerous actors on all sides. These unfolding events and ongoing demands all compete for their attention and struggle to get placed on the government agenda. However, given a context of limited resources (cognitive, financial,...

The intent of this briefing note is to introduce some tools developed in recent years to facilitate the integration of health issues into the decision-making processes of sectors whose primary concern is not population health. It is not the product of a comprehensive review of the various support instruments for health-related decision making, but rather a review of tools associated with the HiAP approach that have been the subject of publications. Most of them are aimed at the municipal decision-making level and are mainly intended for use in urban areas.

The scope of the health determinants considered by each of these tools varies. Some, such as rapid HIA, the Health Matrix and the health lens approach, are more holistic and apply to all types of policies. Thus, they are...

L’évaluation d’impact intégrée (ÉII) constitue un dispositif de soutien à la décision de plus en plus considéré au sein de l’administration publique des pays industrialisés. Cette première note de la série présente brièvement la définition et les origines de l’ÉII, elle fait ensuite un survol de l’état de la pratique actuelle, puis elle expose les principaux constats qui émergent de ce survol. Elle propose, de plus, une clarification de certains concepts connexes à la pratique des ÉII. En effet, celle-ci étant encore jeune et issue de plusieurs écoles de pensée, il nous a semblé utile de mettre à plat ces concepts liés à l’évaluation d’impact pour éclairer le lecteur et lever toute ambiguïté.