17 January 2006

New South Wales HIA Colloquium


CHETRE hosted a colloquium on health impact assessment (HIA) at Bondi on the 9th of December 2005. The colloquium featured presentes from Thailand, Queensland, Victoria and of course New South Wales.

A number of the presentations from the day have already been uploaded to HIA Connect. We're hoping to add video files of the keynote speeches along with more of the concurrent session and workshop presentations soon. I'll let you know here when all the files have been uploaded.

You can find out more about the program and the keynote speakers on the colloquium page.

15 January 2006

HIA in Local Government

A report on the role HIA in local government has been published by the by the HIA Unit at Deakin University.

Blau, G & Mahoney, M. 2005. The Positioning of Health Impact Assessment in Local Government, Deakin University , Melbourne.

From the executive summary:
In those countries where HIA is being applied either strategically or routinely at the local government level, it has directly improved local area planning and public policies, and has indirectly:
  • encouraged key decision-makers in non-health departments to consider unanticipated health impacts of their decisions, particularly differential impacts across the municipality;
  • facilitated intersectoral collaboration within local government;
  • provided a systematic mechanism for evidence-based planning;
  • encouraged ownership of local government decisions by utilising civic intelligence; and
  • identified and made transparent trade-offs in local government decisionmaking.
Download the Report

10 January 2006

Special Issue on HIA: NSW Public Health Bulletin


The NSW Puublic Health Bulletin has released a special issue on HIA, that was lauched at the NSW HIA Colloquium.

Articles in the special issue cover a wide range of HIA-related topics, including: (more)

Guest editorial: Health impact assessment in New South Wales
Elizabeth Harris, Peter Sainsbury and Michael Staff

An introduction to health impact assessment
Sarah Simpson

Contemporary debates in health impact assessment: what? why? when?
Elizabeth Harris

Response to ‘Contemporary debates in health impact assessment’
Michael Staff

Health impact assessment: An international perspective
Alex Scott-Samuel

Health impact assessment in Australia
Mary Mahoney

Health impact assessment in New Zealand
Barbara Langford

The art of the possible: experience and practice in health impact assessment in New South Wales
Stephen Corbett

Building an equity focus in health impact assessment
Rosemary Aldrich, Mary Mahoney, Elizabeth Harris, Sarah Simpson and Jenny Stewart-Williams

The New South wales Health Impact Assessment Project
Ben Harris-Roxas and Sarah Simpson

Constructing a database of development applications considered by public health units in New South Wales
Trish Mannes and Adam Capon

Health impact assessment case study: working with local government to obtain health benefits
Sarah Thackway, Susan Furber and Leonie Neville

Health impact assessment on an integrated chronic disease prevention campaign
Blythe O’Hara, Jenny Hughes, Paul Kehoe, Hannah Bairdm, Therese Milham and Sharon Hills

NSw Health Aboriginal Health Impact Statement
Liz Wheeler

The NSW Public Health Bulletin is a peer-reviewed, Medline listed journal and copes of the HIA issue can be downloaded for free from:
http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/public-health/phb/HTML2005/julaug05html/julyAug05.pdf

9 January 2006

Effective report writing, the 1:3:25 rule.

One of the major hazards facing practitioners of HIA is effective report writing. It is easy to become so involved in the process of the HIA that the final report becomes something longer and less accessible than the Magna Carta! Such reports are ineffectual because the purpose of a HIA is to influence the heady world of project, program, or policy decision making. These people want clear concise recommendations supported by a clear concise and transparent rationale concerning why these recommendations have been made.

One useful strategy to consider is offered by the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (http://www.chsrf.ca/). This is the ‘1:3:25 rule’: start with one page of main messages; follow that with a three page executive summary; and present findings in no more than 25 pages of writing. The Foundation has provided a very useful two page resource detailing how to write using the rule. This available for download as one of a series of useful resources from http://www.chsrf.ca/knowledge_transfer/resources_e.php#commnotes

Enjoy!