Promoting health and wellbeing at health precincts: a rapid review of four built environment audit tools for assessing health precincts

Abstract

Abstract In Australia, ‘health precincts’ are increasingly touted as the new innovation hub. They perform important health care functions, and often incorporate vital research and innovation roles. As such, they do not only assist patients in recovery but also promote health and wellbeing to safeguard their patients, visitors and workers. Although their functions in disease care are unquestionable, less is known about whether and how health precincts promote health and wellbeing. Over the past decade, several audit tools have been developed to assess the degrees of, first, sustainability and, more recently, health promotion of individual buildings. No comparable audit tools, however, exist that can account for the role of health promotion of multi-building and multi-functional spaces like health precincts. This paper reports on a rapid review on the suitability of four existing built environment audit tools—the Health Facility Audit Tool, health impact assessments, the WELL Building Standard checklist, and the Built Environment Assessment Tool—for assessing the promotion of health in health precincts. Twenty-six papers published in English between 2010 and 2022 were included in this rapid review, many (n = 15) of which were critical assessment of one of the four tools. Our findings show a lack of application of such tools at the precinct scale, with many instead focusing on the city or metropolitan scale (n = 7) or individual office buildings (n = 5). For each audit tool, we report on the benefits and drawbacks highlighted. We conclude with suggestions on how these audit tools may be adapted for application at health precincts.