The Swedish HIA Tool
Swedish Federation of Local Government
Available
at http://chetre.med.unsw.edu.au/files/Swedish_HIA_focus_on_health (accessed 7.9.04)
This tool has been designed for use by local government
officials in the development of policy. In Sweden they have decided that
those who are elected to represent people locally should be responsible
for implementing HIA. For this reason the tool is short and asks quite
specific questions that demand the person using it is very familiar with
the policy and with health issues. It is a web based screening tool with a
number of parts. There is a general explanation of what HIA is, a section
on policy and public health, a section with the actually tool and a
section that gives examples of how it has been used by Swedish local
authorities.
The first section is very short and gives a short
definition of HIA and explains when it should be used in the Swedish
context. The second section gives a useful explanation about public health
and policy that could be used as part of the basis for an explanation
about the social
model of health for those who do not have a public health background.
As the tool has been designed for use in Sweden all the examples used to
explain the different points are set in Sweden, so there would need to be
some work done to find relevant examples from the Australian context.
The section on other types of impact assessments in short
but looks at several types of impact assessment that are relevant. There
are contact names on the page if the reader was interested in finding out
more.
The next section is the section where the tools (called
"The HIA instrument") is located. The front page gives a very short
explanation of what the person using the tool needs to know. It is very
clear that there is a need to understand local conditions and the issues
for health locally. The tools themselves
can be downloaded as word documents and could be adapted for use by
others.. The first part, called "The Health Question", asks three
questions. It would be necessary for the person/people doing the screening exercise to have a good
understanding of public health evidence to address the questions well. The
second part, called "The Health Matrix", suggests more specific areas that
need to be thought about both in relation to the prioritized groups and
the entire population. This could be very useful both as part of screening and for use as part of
scoping. The final part, called "Health
Impact Analysis" asks a series of questions that would again be useful
either in screening or scoping. It would be important to have
people who understood the policy, the local context and the public health
evidence well if this tool was going to be used as there is no a room for
the input of stakeholders when using this tool.
The final section of the tool is a section on practice that
discusses how HIA is being used in Sweden. There are some interesting case
studies that could be adapted for use by a group in training.
Overall, the tool is short and to the point but could not be used by someone who
did not have a great deal of knowledge about public health and about the
policy that they were screening. The questions could be adapted to be used
in scoping.
Reviewed by Caron Bowen
Available at http://chetre.med.unsw.edu.au/files/Swedish_
HIA_ focus_ on_ health (accessed 7.9.04)
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