HIA Practice Standards issued by North American HIA Practice Standards Working Group

April 7, 2009

SFDPH is excited to co-release the recently developed Practice Standards for Health Impact Assessment (HIA) created by the North American HIA Practice Standards Working Group. These standards were developed to provide practitioners of health impact assessment with a set of benchmarks to guide their own HIA practice, and to stimulate discussion about HIA content and quality in this emerging field.

In September 2008, a number of North American HIA practitioners gathered in Oakland, California for a two day conference to discuss the state of the field and debate issues of quality, standards development and values in the conduct of health impact assessment. Participants strongly felt a need for practice standards or benchmarks to clearly establish HIA quality. Without practice standards, it was felt the term health impact assessment may become ambiguous and the practice misused or vulnerable to criticism.

This document is the result of a collective effort on behalf of a working group of Conference participants who formed to develop these standards. The Practice Standards are short—11 pages in total—and attempt to translate the values underlying HIA into specific "standards for practice" for each of the five typical stages of the HIA process. These standards may be used by practitioners as benchmarks for their own HIA practice or to stimulate discussion about HIA content and quality in this emerging field.

Several of the organizations involved in the Conference have signed on to the Practice Standards as signatories, including Environmental Resources Management, Habitat Health Impact Consulting Corp., Human Impact Partners, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, University of California Berkeley Health Impact Group, as well as a number of individual participants listed in the document.

The authors and signatories do not claim to have achieved all of these standards in our work to date. We recognize that real-world constraints will result in diversity of HIA practice. Overall, we hope these standards will be viewed as relevant, instructive and motivating for advancing HIA quality rather than rigorous criteria for acceptable or adequate HIA.

We also hope this document may provoke discussion on whether international practice standards for HIA are needed. Comments and suggestions for future versions of the Practice Standards for Health Impact Assessment (HIA) are welcome and may be directed to rajiv.bhatia@sfdph.org.