Lessons about health impact assessment: Learning by Doing

VicHealth team presenting on their
equity focused health impact assessment

Last week I attended the final day of a Learning by Doing health impact assessment (HIA) training program. Learning by Doing is a structured six-day training program run by the Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation (CHETRE), where I work. The training is broken up into distinct stages. People learn about HIA, go away and do the steps they've learned about, then come back to reflect and learn about the next steps in the process.

The final day is always great because the different groups who have been doing their HIAs present their work and their findings. There were five HIAs conducted in this round of Learning by Doing, which included the South Western Sydney Local Health District, the NSW Department of Family and Community Services, VicHealth, Liverpool City Council, the Think+Do Tank and community representatives.

Some of the stand-out lessons from the Learning by Doing sites were:

• A lot of the value of HIA lies in highlighting and clarifying assumptions made during planning.
• A planned engagement approach is useful as part of all HIAs.
• Conceptual learning remains an important outcome of HIAs, in particular learning about health equity.
• Involving consumers in HIAs has multiple practical benefits, such as identifying alternatives and providing an understanding of  context and history.
• Scoping remains as critical as always - being rigorous but not biting off more than you can chew (it also reminded me of this paper about scoping in EIA).
• Not all barriers can be overcome; you need to be realistic about what you can achieve within the limits of an HIA.

For more on CHETRE's work on health impact assessment go to HIA Connect. The Learning by Doing approach is described in greater detail in the chapter below:

Harris E, Harris-Roxas B, Harris P, Kemp L. “Learning by Doing”: Building Workforce Capacity to undertake HIA - An Australian case study, in O’Mullane M (ed) Integrating Health Impact Assessment into the Policy Process: Lessons and Experiences from around the World, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013, p 99-108. ISBN 9 7801 9963 9960 Google Books link

Cross-posted from my personal blog