Health Impact Assessment: Building Public Health into Decision-Making

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IN RECENT years, interest has been growing around the issue of health impact assessment. As defined by the World Health Organization's European office, health impact assessment is "a combination of procedures, methods and tools by which a policy, program or project may be judged as to its potential effects on the health of a population and the distribution of those effects within the population." In short, its aim is to make sure policies and projects don't harm human health.

In the United States, health impact assessment is an outgrowth of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which specified that effects on health, public health and safety be considered when …