Abstract
Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is widely recognized as a key instrument for operationalizing the Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach in municipal planning and decision-making. Understanding and sharing knowledge on challenges and solutions on how to implement and strengthen HIA in municipal planning practice is therefore essential. This roundtable will draw on the expertise and knowledge on HIA from Canada and the European region, including Norway and United Kingdom (UK). The objective is to provide insights into how health considerations are currently addressed in municipal planning processes across contexts, and how HIA can be better integrated into everyday planning practice. Through a combination of short presentations and interactive discussion, participants will be invited to reflect upon challenges, solutions and lessons learned from using HIA within municipal planning practice.The presenters will share knowledge derived from existing research within different contexts. Recent research from Norway shows that national guidelines are often perceived as insufficiently operational for use in daily planning practice, particularly under constraints related to time, capacity, knowledge and resources. As a consequence, municipalities and consultants frequently develop their own adapted approaches, leading to fragmented practice. Moreover, HIAs are rarely conducted for overarching comprehensive municipal plans or detailed zoning plans, and health considerations are often weakly integrated into political decision-making and statutory impact assessments. If they are carried out, experience in the UK demonstrates that whilst this happens, decision makers often override or ignore health enabling actions and policies in favor of more economic development opportunities and some developers scope out any health improvement to maximize their profit. In Canada, provincial legislation requiring HIAs for relevant policies varies from strong enabling legislation to complete absence. Similarly, investment in public health staff with dedicated time and skills to work on HIAs at local, provincial or national levels varies widely across the country with pockets of expertise that have been working in isolation creating inefficiencies and potential inconsistencies. Efforts to overcome these challenges have been coordinated by the National Collaborating Centre on Health Public Policy and the Urban Public Health Network of Canada using workshops and promotion of best practice. Together these findings provide a comprehensive and coherent platform for discussing challenges, solutions and lessons learned across contexts and exploring how HIA can be integrated into regular municipal planning processes, including comprehensive plans, zoning plan proposals and decisions, political decision-making, and other statutory assessment frameworks. In addition to the panel discussants, the audience will be engaged in the discussion throughout the session.
Key messages
• Effective HIA requires operational tools, skills, time, and clear political prioritization, supported by coherent provincial and regional legislation.
• Early, systematic embedding of HIA in municipal planning is essential for Health in All Policies and requires coordinated cross-national action to institutionalize and scale best practices.
Speakers/Panellists
Odile Mekel
State Office for Health and Occupational Safety North Rhine-Westphalia, Bochum, Germany
Emma Charlott Nordbø
Department of Public Health Science, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway
Liz Green
Public Health Wales, Wrexham, UK
Cordell Neudorf
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada