Keeping health in the plan: Rapid Participatory Stakeholder Health Impact Assessment (HIA) Workshops
A toolkit for local authority planning policy and public health teams in England
Local Plans shape many of the conditions that influence health and wellbeing, and health inequalities. Impact assessments should be used to inform the preparation of Local Plans to ensure that their likely social, economic and environmental effects are understood and considered as choices are made.
Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a valuable process that enables action on the wider determinants of health. It can help maximise the health and wellbeing benefits of a plan or development and minimise the potential harms, while maintaining a focus on reducing inequalities.
Under the new plan-making system in England, the previous requirement for Sustainability Appraisal (SA) has fallen away and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is the principal statutory impact assessment framework. SEA provides an important legal hook for considering population and human health, but it is an environmental, rather than a health-focused, process.
This toolkit is designed to sit alongside SEA, Integrated Impact Assessment or other assessment work, adding a focused qualitative health and inequalities lens. It provides a practical, proportionate way to bring together public health evidence, professional knowledge and stakeholder insight to explore the wider determinants of health, differential impacts on population groups and places and issues that may otherwise be less visible within broader assessment processes.
