The Merseyside Guidelines for Health Impact Assessment
Alex Scott-Samuel, Martin Birley & Kate Arden
Available at:
http://www.ihia.org.uk/document/merseyguide3.pdf (accessed 5.1.04)
The Merseyside
Guidelines were the first set of guidelines on HIA to be published in the
UK. They give a short but good introduction to what the purpose of HIA is
and acknowledge that the procedures and methods they outline may need to
be adapted to work in other situations. The guidelines differentiate
between procedures and methods explaining that the HIA framework is a
procedure and the methods are the ways an appraisal might be undertaken.
There is a concise explanation of what the role of screening is and a discussion of
the role of a steering group, however, there is very little about how to
go about scoping the HIA. There is a short discussion about negotiation in
relation to the recommendations and about implementation, monitoring and
evaluation. These is an outline screening tool which brings up some useful
pointers but uses public health jargon and could be difficult to use.
There is a whole section on methods for HIA that gives outlines of policy analysis,
profiling, stakeholders and key informants. It describes these but does
not give much detail about how to go about doing them. It goes on to
discuss identification of health impacts, assessment of health risks,
quantification and ranking and then discusses the formulation of
recommendations.
There is a useful framework on page 13 that can be used by the steering group or in
stakeholder meetings to identify what the positive and negative impacts of
a project (or parts of a project) might be. Although to use it well the
group would need to be well facilitated by someone with an understanding
of the HIA process.
The final section discusses conceptual and methodological
issues and is a useful guide on different types of HIA, training staff and
the costs of undertaking a comprehensive HIA.
Reviewed by Caron Bowen
Available at:
http://www.ihia.org.uk/document/merseyguide3.pdf (accessed 5.1.04)
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