The Impacts of Health Impact Assessment: A Review of 54 Health Impact Assessments, 2007-2012

The Impacts of Health Impact Assessment: A Review of 54 Health Impact Assessments, 2007-2012 Public Deposited

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Creator

Singleton-Baldrey, Lisa
- Affiliation: Gillings School of Global Public Health, Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering

Abstract

Increasing rates of chronic disease and mortality across the United States have prompted public health officials and others to call for increased use of health impact assessment (HIA) to inform policies projects, plans, and programs in domains outside the health-care sector. This project reviewed 54 HIAs to determine whether they used quantitative health risk assessment methods and whether they affected decision-making. The impacts on decision-making were determined from a survey of HIA practitioners and publicly available documents and were categorized using a novel classification system. This research indicates that HIAs are impacting decision-making in the United States to varying degrees. HIAs rarely provide quantitative estimates of health outcomes, though survey results suggest that HIA practitioners believe quantitative assessments would increase the potential for impacts on decision-making.

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