Planning for Healthy Places with Health Impact Assessments
A screenshot of the online slide show A few years back the American Planning Association in association with the National Association of County and City Health Officials created the online course Planning for Healthy Places with Health Impact Assessments at http://advance.captus.com/planning/hia2/home.aspx. Don’t be put off by the initial survey that you have to fill […]
Food Resources
Food stall in Stockholm. Photo: Ann Forsyth How people get access to healthy food is a concern to many. I’ve recently had some requests for information. Design for Health resources include an “issues sheet” with ideas for incorporating food into planning and a research summary. Links include a food security assessment, also featured on an […]
Visuals: What Does a Rapid HIA Look Like?
This blog has dealt earlier with the logistics of doing an HIA but what does a workshop look like? One source is the Arden Hills Healthy City Planning Workshop Summary Report Appendices. This document contains images of each stage of the half-day workshop. Go to http://designforhealth.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/cases/HIA_ArdenHills_Appendices_3June2010.pdf and look at pages 33-36. More information about the […]
Tools: What is a Rapid HIA?
On the face of it Rapid HIAs are quick, but that’s not the whole story. A rapid HIA while faster than a full, environmental impact assessment-style HIA, still takes some time. It is also different to some other quick HIA types such as desktop screening or scoping exercises. Students performing a practice health impact assessment […]
Resources: Health, Place, and Children
Children, because they are still growing and developing, often suffer from different or additional health risks compared with adults. There are many useful resources on this topic–I list a few below specifically tailored to health and places. Feeding chickens. Photo: Heather Forsyth Children’s Health Protection Sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), this Web […]
Resources: Planning and Active Living
Active living, the idea that it’s good to build exercise into daily life, has been big news in planning for a while but I still get questions about how to incorporate active living into plans. A decade ago, when it was a fairly new idea, there was the hope that if we built places where people were […]
Tools for Conducting an HIA on a Comprehensive Plan
I’ve recently had a number of queries about how to conduct a health impact assessment on an existing comprehensive plan. This is a great thing to do because it can help prioritize changes in an update. How to conduct an HIA is a big topic, but fortunately there are a lot of resources available with […]
How Do People Connect Places and Health in Practice?
I am often asked how to connect health and place, practically. There are two main ways of thinking about this–one relates to topics and another to methods. In terms of topics there are several lists available. Most end out looking like the following list, adapted from Design for Health (http://www.designforhealth.net/resources/generalhealthissues.html). However other, quite similar, […]
Tools: The National Collaborative for Childhood Obesity Research Measure Registry
Recently I highlighted work of the National Collaborative for Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR). a group spearheaded by the National Institute of Health, Centers for Disease Control, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They have now released a new tool, or rather a registry of measures related to diet and physical activity: http://tools.nccor.org/measures/. I was part of the […]
Research: High Density and Overweight Adolescents
I typically don’t report on scholarly studies in this blog but recently came across a nicely designed study that makes a larger point—that the links between health and place are complex. Fei Xu, JieQuan Li, YaQiong Liang, ZhiYong Wang, Xin Hong, Robert S Ware, Eva Leslie, Takemi Sugiyama, and Neville Owen have produced a report on […]