Contemporary debates in health impact assessment: What? Why? When?

Abstract

Public health practitioners and policy makers in Australia have a long history of advocating for health impact assessment (HIA) to be undertaken on major public and private projects and policies. Over the past decade a number of internationally recognised guidelines and discussion papers have been developed in Australia that have tried to strengthen HIA in environmental impact assessment processes. Internationally, advocates for the development of healthy public policy have promoted HIA as a necessary step in policy development. Those with an interest in reducing health inequalities have supported this and called for a closer examination of the distributional impacts on groups within the population, especially those groups most marginalized or disadvantaged.