Health impact assessments are an important tool in confronting the nation's health problems, according to a recent report.
Released in September by the National Research Council, the report presents a six-step framework for conducting health impact assessments.
Health impact assessments are used to evaluate the health effects of proposed plans or policies before they are put into practice. The report says improvements in the nation's health will only come about if health impact assessments become widespread.
'My hope, frankly, is that this report will take the blinders off,' said APHA member Richard J. Jackson, MD, MPH, chair of the report's authoring committee and professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California Los Angeles School of Public Health.
Underscoring a point APHA has been driving home with its work in transportation and climate change, the report stressed that some policies and programs historically not recognized as relating to health are known to have important health consequences. And while the use of health impact assessments has increased nationwide in the past 10 years, no federal law specifically requires the assessments.
Jackson, former director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said risk assessment, such as factoring the number of cancer cases per million population caused by exposure to a pollutant, has become a specialty over the past three decades in the environmental field. But he said the typical risk assessment does not adequately take advantage of community input. With any new project, such input is vital, Jackson told The Nation's Health.
The report lists several challenges that could hamper the success of health impact assessments as well as suggestions for addressing those challenges. They include 'balancing the need to provide timely, valid information with the realities of varying data quality' and working to ensure quantitative estimates of health effects are provided whenever possible.
Jackson said health impact assessments are necessary to health improvement. 'Treating people after they're ill is ultimately a bad deal,' Jackson said.
The report, 'Improving Health in the United States: The Role of Health Impact Assessment,' is available at www.nap.edu.
APHA's health impact assessment fact sheet is available via the reports link at www.apha.org/transportation.
