The Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ) and the National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy publish a Public Policy and Health Newsletter. As with previous issues, the current newsletter provides a great deal of information on health impact assessment, including the just completed international conference on HIA. It also links to a Health Council of Canada blog calling for more use of HIAs as a collaborative tool to help integrate policy development across government departments.
The Wellesley Institute has done quite a lot of work over the years on Health Equity Impact Assessment, including speaking at a recent Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care conference. In terms of the argument made in the Health Council’s blog, we have also conducted a number of assessments of policy issues well beyond health care. We have found policy-orientated HEIAs to be an effective way to concretely demonstrate how population health can and must be integrated into a wide range of policy issues, such as the implications of municipal cuts to social and other programs and cuts to refugee health care programs. We have adapted this same principle of building population health analysis into policy development in a series of collaborative briefs setting out how health enabling features could be incorporated into social assistance reform in Ontario.