Quantifying the health impacts of policies - principles, methods, and models

Over the last few years, the attempt to quantify health impacts of new policies, plans and programs has gained in importance. Different approaches, models, and tools have been, or are being, developed internationally for this purpose.

A European workshop was held on this issue between 16-17 March this year in Dusseldorf organised by our kind colleagues - Rainer Fehr and Odile Mekel - at the North Rhineland and Westphalia Institute for Health and Work.

This was a really great workshop that brought together leading researchers that are developing health impact quantification methods in Europe (mostly).

The hope is to follow this workshop with one next year and over subsequent years in order to create a wider international forum and network of researchers and practitioners that are actively developing approaches to quantifying health and wellbeing impacts. The aim of this forum and network would be to analyse and synthesise these different methods to - among other things -  a) identify which quantitative methods work best in which contexts and b) how these methods can work with each other.

The workshop programme and the presentations have now been placed online and can be downloaded and viewed at:

http://www.liga.nrw.de/service/downloads/pub-gesundheit/pub-tagng/100316_quanitying_health_impacts/index.html


Programme Outline

Programme of the workshop

Welcome
Eleftheria Lehmann, Director General of LIGA.NRW


Session 1: Principles of quantification of health impacts
Vision and promise of quantification in health-related Impact Assessments
Rainer Fehr (LIGA.NRW, Germany)
Summary Measures of Population Health (SMPH) in health-related Impact Assessments
Annette Prüss-Üstün (WHO Geneva, Switzerland)
Critical comment on the use of Summary Measures of Population Health (SMPH) in health-related Impact Assessments
Michael Schümann (BSG, Germany)
Equity and quantification in health-related Impact Assessments
Fiona Haigh (IMPACT+, United Kingdom)


Session 2: Models / projects
PREVENT
Esther de Vries (Erasmus MC, the Netherlands)
DYNAMO HIA
Wilma Nusselder (Erasmus MC, the Netherlands), Hendriek Boshuizen (RIVM, the Netherlands)
BoD in NRW
Claudia Terschüren (LIGA.NRW, Germany), Claudia Hornberg (University of Bielefeld, Germany)
HEIMTSA / INTARESE Toolbox
Introduction about the projects / integrated environmental HIA
Hilary Cowie (IOM, Scotland)
INTARESE-based Guidebook / Resource Centre
Volker Klotz (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
HEIMTSA-based computational Toolbox
Alberto Gotti (JRC, Italy)
Current area of application: major case study
Volker Klotz (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Impact Calculation Tool
Anne Knol (RIVM, the Netherlands), Virpi Kollanus (THL, Finland)
Health Forecasting
Jeroen van Meijgaard (UCLA, United States of America)