Integrating Health into Comprehensive Planning
Integrating Health into Comprehensive Planning
There is growing interest in the link between the built environment and health. Comprehensive planning is one approach to linking the traditional notions of planning (land use, transportation, community facilities, housing, and parks and open space) with health themes (physical activity, the natural environment, public safety, healthy eating, mental health, social capital, pollutants, and epidemiological issues). Comprehensive plans can help facilitate decisions about health and the built environment. To do so, it is important to understand state and regional regulations that often require a consistent set of elements where health topics can be interwoven.
Design for Health (DFH) Materials
- Planning Information Sheet: Integrating Health into Comprehensive Planning (1.10 MB)
- Key Questions Research Summaries
- Key Questions: Background and Instructions, linking urban planning and health (293 KB)
- Plan Case Studies
- Image Resources
- Event Presentations
- Topical Planning Guides
- Comprehensive Plan Review Checklists
- Example Plans
Health Impact Assessment (HIA) Preliminary Checklist
The Design For Health (DFH) preliminary checklist is the first step in the HIA process used to identify health issues and determine if further assessment is needed. This simple two-page form enables planners to assess whether a project is significant enough in size and scope and has enough potential health effects to warrant more work. Part 1 addresses the size of the project/plan and Part 2 focuses on easily assessable specific items. These effects can be positive or negative, and are not the only effects that a project/plan may have.
For someone very familiar with the project, it should take only a few minutes to fill out. If additional information is needed, then it might take a couple of hours. In this desktop exercise, a reviewer responds to questions and sums the scores. The total score helps guide a decision about pursuing a more elaborate HIA. Although the total points may not indicate the need for an HIA, answers to a specific question could indicate a need to conduct further assessment.
- Preliminary Checklist(115 KB) June 2007
- HIA Preliminary Checklist: Background and Instructions: Ver. 2.0 (339 KB) July 2007
Reports and Guidelines
- Creating a Regulatory Blueprint for Healthy Community Design: A Local Government Guide to Reforming Zoning and land Development CodesA publication of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA).
Web Sites
- HIA-CLIC–UCLA Health Impact Assessment Clearinghouse Learning and Information Center
. A great site that is constantly being updated with new information. Particularly useful is its division between sectors and pathways. Pathways include things like access to parks or air quality, akin to the Design for Health topics:http://www.hiaguide.org/sectors-and-causal-pathways/pathways. Sectors include taxation, housing, and education: http://www.hiaguide.org/sectors-and-causal-pathways/sectors. - Health in All Policies: Prospects and Potentials (full text of book)
This book on health and public policy was co-produced by the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. It highlights how health can and should be taken into account in all levels of government and public policy. Though its focus is often on the European Union, featured topics such as health impact assessment (HIA), the environment and food are all relevant in the United States, as well.
- Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) GIS Tool
Maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this interactive Web site allows users to generate maps displaying the prevalence of behavioral health-risk factors by state and metropolitan/micropolitan statistical areas. Maps are available for 2002-05. - Environmental Public Health Indicators Project
This CDC-sponsored project creates a set of very important public-health indicators. A work-in-progress, the link is to the lists of specific indicators in a number of topics. This link is actually quite hard to find on the Web site. Indicators include potential sources for data. See the general overview. - The Stanford Health Library
- This Stanford University library is a well-organized site full of links to information. While focusing on broad health, issues there is much of interest for those dealing with planning and health.