Presentations from the Health in all Policies New Zealand Conference 2015

For those of us who could not make it to New Zealand below is the next best thing, pdfs of the conference programme and the main presentations.

Health in all Policies New Zealand Conference 2015 Programme

What is Health in All Policies?

Rob Quigley

Sugary Drinks and Public Policy

Dr Rob Beaglehole

Human Rights and HIA

Dr Fiona Haigh (University of New South Wales, Australia)

Health impact assessment (HIA) and human rights both contribute to the promotion of physical and mental health and wellbeing. Human rights provide an ethical and legal framework, while HIA provides evidence-based methods and tools, derived from social and natural sciences, for policy evaluation. Scholars have proposed that international human rights laws and standards provide a legally binding and morally compelling framework for

HIA. Several human rights monitoring mechanisms – including the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health – have called on governments to perform human rights-based impact assessments. It has been hypothesized that HIA can provide a well established evidence based (scientific) method to systematically and transparently assess impacts on the right to health; while human rights contribute a legally binding and morally compelling framework that allows governments and governmental agencies to be held accountable drawing attention to the legal and policy context within which health interventions occur. Despite increasing attention given to human rights and health by policy makers and researchers little has been achieved to date when it comes to integrating human rights considerations into HIA work. Thus, there are few methodologies and tools developed to identify and trace the context specific pathways between a policy, human rights and health outcomes; explain why relationships between these exist or what 'mechanisms' might account for them. In the absence of such explanations it is difficult to decide 'what to do' to improve human rights and health outcomes.

This presentation explores integrating human rights into Health Impact Assessment (HIA) methodology. In particular we report on research examining the fit between HIA and human rights, how HRHIA could work and what are the implications of integrating human rights into Health Impact Assessment (HIA) methodology.

Pegasus Health the Evolution of Primary Care and Health in All Policies

Emeritus Professor Andrew Hornblow

Trading Away Health: A Health Impact Assessment of the Trans Pacific Trade Agreement

Dr Patrick Harris and Fiona Haigh

Good policy-making requires good science

Professor Sir Peter Gluckman

Relationships are the currency of the future

Ana Apatu and Henare O’Keefe

Introduction: Where to now

Mary Richardson

Mind the Gap

Associate Professor Susan Morton

A Canterbury That’s More Than Just All Right...

Dr Lucy D'Aeth

Te Ara Mua Future Streets: Engaging Communities and Challenging Polices

Dr Adrian Field and Dr Alex Macmillan

Over half of the world’s population and three quarters of OECD residents now live in cities. In the last century, New Zealand’s towns and urban areas grew seven-fold while the rural population grew very little. Cities in New Zealand and internationally are at the frontline of addressing public health and environmental sustainability. Concerted and integrated responses from planning, urban design and public health are key to securing an urban form the meets the challenges of cities in the 21st century.

Transport infrastructure poses a particular challenge, where the dominant paradigm often has the private car as is its centrepiece. Transport infrastructure investments also emphasise economic and safety gains while largely ignoring other public health, social and environmental impacts, including impacts on social and health equity. The ideas and thinking that have shaped transport infrastructure have contributed to such global health problems as obesity and social dislocation.

Interventions to re-shape or retrofit existing urban communities can have multiple co-benefits for social, physical, economic and environmental wellbeing, and increasing community resilience to expected future threats. Creating urban form for people rather than cars, improves people’s health, improves perceptions of safety, improves opportunities for physical activity and helps slow the growth of long-term conditions.

Te Ara Mua – Future Streets is a mixed methods intervention study of suburb-wide street changes aimed at making cycling and walking safer and more attractive in Mangere, Auckland.

The project, led by a consortium of universities and consultancies, in partnership with Auckland Transport and New Zealand Transport Agency, brings in leading international thinking in street design, allied with an intensive participatory design process. Te Ara Mua will offer new approaches to design, apply a participatory engagement approach in which knowledge is shared, and look to challenge the ways in which the costs and benefits of street infrastructure are measured, and how these in turn inform policy.

This pecha kucha presentation highlights the contribution that the Te Ara Mua – Future Streets project makes to applying Health In All Policies philosophy at a local level, in a way that challenges established thinking in urban form.

Economic Perspectives on Health in All Policies

Professor Paul Dalziel

The Cancer Society: Long Term Plans, Pathway to Smokefree New Zealand by 2025

Martin Witt and Amanda Dodd

Video component of the presentation by Martin Witt and Amanda Dodd

As a community based organisation, the Cancer Society has anestablished a suite of health promotion programmes designed to raise awareness of lifestyle and cancer risk. Over the last five years the organisation has placed a focus the role of public policy can play in achieving positive health outcomes for our communities. In particular our tobacco control work has placed importance on partnerships with local authorities and other key partners, to facilitate creation of smokefree community spaces. As key steps toward achieving the Smokefree Aotearoa goal by 2025 extending the scope of these policies to go beyond the “greenspace” is essential. Public support for more Smokefree community spaces is strong and there are encouraging signs that other key stakeholders such as businesses are open to further discussions but what do councils think?

With ten years to go to the goal, it is significant that councils are now developing their Long Term Plans [LTP] for the same period offering a timely opportunity for current partnerships to be strengthened. This presentation will outline how the Cancer Society is supporting a Health in All Policies approach, working in partnership to frame the need for councils to demonstrate commitment and leadership in helping ensure that New Zealand does indeed achieve its goal to be Smokefree by 2025. The presentation will address how criteria have been developed to assess the extent to which councils acknowledge their role in promoting Smokefree policy and

how this might develop over the next few years. Council responses to submissions will be evaluated against these criteria.

Although there are examples of councils already demonstrating strategies consistent with the 2025 goal, most notably Auckland and Palmerston North , there need to be much stronger signs that other councils recognise the significance of their role; a role that does not mean a large financial commitment. LTP are by their nature based on the use of limited resources, however they are also open to public consultation and intended to be an outline of all council activities that help make communities safe places to live work and play in. Failure to engage councils in the 2025 goal as part of their LTP’s in 2015 would seem to be inconsistent with that intention.

Transport and Health in All Policies

Dr Alex Macmillan

Transport policy has a strong and complex influence on population health, social and health equity, and environmental sustainability, which underpins human health. Currently in New Zealand, transport policy objectives are heavily focused on supporting economic growth through congestion reduction and freight movement, while addressing road traffic injury. Although some attempts have been made to incorporate wider public health objectives into transport planning more recently, these have been hampered by knowledge, skills, institutional and ideological barriers. Using more than a decade of experience with influencing transport policy using an arsenal of approaches, I will explore how successful this influence has been and the factors underpinning more and less successful influence. I will also draw together some insights from this experience for Health in all Policies more generally.

View the presentations from the Reflective Practice Day on 30th April 2015

Original Source: Healthy Christchurch