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Abstract
Health Impact Assessment (HIA) courses are teaching public health and urban planning students how to assess the likely health effects of proposed policies, plans, and projects. We suggest that public health and urban planning have complimentary frameworks for training practitioners to address the living conditions that affect health. Planning perspectives emphasize practical skills for impacting community change, while public health stresses professional purpose and ethics. Frameworks from both disciplines can enhance the HIA learning experience by helping students tackle questions related to community impact, engagement, social justice, and ethics. We also propose that HIA community engagement processes can be enriched through an empathetic practice that focuses on greater personal introspection.
Highlights
Health Impact Assessment (HIA) uses scientific evidence, professional expertise, and stakeholder input to evaluate the different paths through which proposed policies, plans, and projects may affect health, and makes recommendations to maximize benefits and minimize risks [1,2,3]
This type of narrowing of focus requires an acknowledgment that the primary goal of HIA is to address health, which can be introduced to students through discussions of the fundamental differences between the goals of urban planning and public health
HIA provides an opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together planning and public health students, allowing them to exchange expertise, and learning what each field can bring to HIA practice
Summary
Health Impact Assessment (HIA) uses scientific evidence, professional expertise, and stakeholder input to evaluate the different paths through which proposed policies, plans, and projects may affect health, and makes recommendations to maximize benefits and minimize risks [1,2,3]. Some of the most challenging issues that may arise through service learning include questions of how to work in diverse communities, and what the potential impact is project work for people’s daily lives These challenges encompass ethical questions of social justice, fairness, marginalization, and power, topics that public health traditions and empathetic practice may offer insights for addressing. Calling on professional HIA experience and teaching a semester long HIA course to 10 students from a mix of urban planning, public health, and environmental science backgrounds at the undergraduate, graduate, and continuing professional levels, we highlight how planning’s use of reflective practice, public health’s ethical frameworks, and the use of empathy in practice can help future practitioners tackle fundamental questions related to (1) community impact, (2) social justice and ethics, and (3) community engagement. Empathetic practice has been minimally explored in both planning and public health fields, we point to the potential value of empathy in facilitating community engagement and enabling students to develop a more nuanced view of community members’ experiences and needs
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