Parallel Session 4: Approaches, Methods and Tools - HIA at local level

Developing Jurisdiction Specific HIA Tools in Toronto

Olanna White

Mixed Waste Processing HIA pilot. Evaluation of the pilot HIA found that:

• Health considered in decision making
• Stakeholder involvement
• Improved partnerships within the organisation
• Framework proved adaptable
• Time and resource intensive
• Framework document was lengthy and required expertise to use
• Better suited to environmental projects and programmes

Found that steps of the process were not linear sometimes screen g, scoping and assessment occurred at the same time and we did not consider monitoring and evaluation.


We don't do formal HIAs because staff find it overwhelming at the moment. There have also been missed opportunities to do HIA.


Can we adapt the HIA process or do we have to follow all the steps. Yes, we developed the Draft Torornto Public Health HIA Checklist.

Revitalising Thailand's Community Health Impact Assessment

Somporn Pengkam

Concept

• Considered a social tool for community development with a focus on community determination

Process and procedure

• 4 steps
• Developing tools
• Assessing the health of a community
• Ovine towards decision making
• Monitoring and evaluation

Practices

• ...

Lessons learnt

• Tool for development of public policy on health
• Enhancing participatory democracy
• Mutual learning across sectors
• Tool for empowerment
• CHIA: CORE VALUE, HOLISTIC, INTEGRATION, ASSESSMENT

Challenges

• Shift the parading on health
• Shift paradigm on impact assessment
• Shift paradigm on community right protection

Next Steps

• Building a clear understanding of key concepts, knowledge, guideline different fields
• Creating a critical mass around quality and expertise
• Develop concrete applications

Q&A

Q: How do you help communities access literature on health so that they can look at the evidence on health impacts?

A: In Thailand, the community asks the Commission and agencies support the community accessing and understanding the literature.

A: In Italy, public health act as the representative of the community so that we are still looking at this issue.



I: Healthevidence.ca is a website provides systematic reviews of key areas of evidence.



Q: one o fthe main challenge in community participation in HIA is how we reach 'hard to reach' groups, they don't normally get involved, 'invisible' populations?

A: In Thailand, we don't look at the physical village or district level, we start from a small group concerned about an impact and then other people start joining the process.



I: Our experience use PATH CHIA our process is to train local people to lead the process, and then get the community to develo their own tool, in our local context 56 focus groups were used to develop the tool.