For practitioners interested in integrating health research into planning and design, the task can be daunting. There are many articles that touch on the topic of the connection between people, health, and place but with varying levels of relevance, research quality, and cost (and many can be quite expensive to those who don’t have university library subscriptions). Into the gap have come a number of organizations creating practice-oriented research summaries.

• InformeDesign summarizes many articles, and has an easy search interface, which is very helpful: http://www.informedesign.org/Default.aspx. To find syntheses that evaluate the balance of evidence one needs to go to other sources.
• UCLA HIA-CLIC has some helpful summaries of research organized by sector (e.g transportation) and pathway (e.g air quality) http://www.hiaguide.org/sectors-and-causal-pathways. Not every issues has information—a number are forthcoming—but it’s generally a helpful site.
• Design for Health’s research summaries are now 3 or 4 years old: http://designforhealth.net/resources/researchsummaries.html. This is more of a problem in the area of physical activity and food—where there has been a lot of recent research—than in the other topics where there are fewer new studies. For those wanting to get updated research there are larger topical pages listing other resources: http://designforhealth.net/resources/generalhealthissues.html and a list of web sites by topic is available at .