A05 Making HIAs more digestible: Bite-Sized Lessons Learned from HIAs Linking Transportation & Health in the Southern United States

Abstract

BackgroundThis presentation articulates what Health Impact Assessment means for transportation planning in the United States. It showcases lessons learned through six HIAs linking health with transportation and regional planning. While much of the buzz about Health Impact Assessment in the United States has posed it as an emerging trend with great promise, there remain challenges among local and state agencies in their understanding of HIA and willingness to engage in the process. Acceptance of HIA findings varied among agencies. HIA in PracticeThis paper/presentation addresses how six Health Impact Assessments conducted primarily in the southern United States encountered challenges related to data collection/evaluation, creating partnerships, overcoming interagency barriers, and changing community conversations about health and transportation. It chronicles how HIAs can be applied in a variety of land use contexts. The HIAs are:•Wake County (North Carolina) Northeast Area Transportation Study•Southwestern Commission (Western North Carolina) Regional Comprehensive Plan•Robbinsville (North Carolina) Pedestrian Plan•Haywood County (North Carolina) Bicycle Plan•Buncombe County (North Carolina) Greenways & Trails Master Plan•Blaine County (Idaho) Bicycle & Pedestrian Plan Fitting the contextThe varied contexts in which these HIAs have been conducted, including population base, local political climate, governance structure, involvement of health organizations, geography, and availability of data, led to creation of various methods to address the six steps of HIA. They revealed varying levels of interest among government agencies related to degree of engagement in the process and how the findings were utilized. Some efforts began with the goal of conducting an HIA but were reduced in scope due to differences of opinion among lead agencies as to the ultimate findings and efficacy of the HIA. Lessons LearnedThe availability of data and degree to which data from the health sector aligned with common datasets in the transportation sectors posed challenges. There are few datasets for public health that have information available at a US Census tract level. Each HIA utilized data related to social determinants of health to identify hot spots of high prevalence of poor health conditions. Some HIAs have utilized additional data obtained from the North Carolina’s Center for Health Statistics, but utility of this data was limited depending on the geographic scale of HIA. The other key lessoned learned is that four out of the six HIAs received funding from non-health-based funding sources, which is rare in the United States.