Wellesley Institute

Wellesley Institute works in research and policy to improve health and health equity in the GTA through action on the social determinants of health.

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Templates and User Guides for Equity-Focused Impact Assessment

A number of jurisdictions have developed tools, templates, and user guides for equity-focused impact assessment:

  • Wales and New Zealand have led in developing and implementing focused HEIA tools.
    • New Zealand’s Ministry of Health has produced a health equity assessment tool and a user’s guide on how to use the tool for evaluating current and future health impacts of policies, programs and interventions.  They have also developed a tool to specifically assess impacts of policies on the Māori population of New Zealand.
    • Wales has a number of templates and guides including a template for Equality Impact Assessment and a series of appraisal tools and guidelines for Health Inequalities Impact Assessment, targeted for use at a local level.
  • The Australasian Collaboration for Health Equity Impact Assessment developed a detailed Equity-Focused HIA Framework that arose out of a research project funded by the Australian Government’s Public Health Education Research Program Innovations Grant. The framework can be used to identify systemic and unanticipated inequities within the decision-making and other activities of various sectors and groups.
  • As part of a local project, the Wellesley partnered with the Toronto Central LHIN and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care to develop and refine a Health Equity Impact Assessment Tool and Workbook, available on the LHIN’s health equity webpage.
  • Scotland has developed an Equality Impact Assessment Tool to assess policy or program implications for equity not just in health, but in other dimensions of inequality as well.

There are also some practical HIA guides from Australia, Wales, and Canada:

  • The Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation of the University of New South Wales has published a practical guide to HIA. The guide is based on the experience of a HIA capacity-building project and aims to encourage greater consideration of wellbeing in project and policy development in New South Wales, Australia.
  • The Welsh Health Impact Assessment Support Unit, funded by the Welsh Assembly Government, wrote a report entitled Improving Health And Reducing Inequalities: A Practical Guide To Health Impact Assessment which provides an overview of how to use HIA as well as some useful checklists relating to well-being determinants and disadvantaged population groups.
  • The National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy in Québec put together a document of Guides And Tools on HIA. This is a fantastic resource that divides HIA tools into three categories: general guides and orientation documents, applied tools (focusing on specific sectors or themes) and general tools. Toolkits and documents from all over the world are very well-organized in chart format.

And, an interesting tool for local health service planning in the UK:

  • The London Health Observatory has developed a Health Inequalities Intervention Toolkit, which supports evidence-based service planning and commissioning. Regional data is put into planning models in order to assess the potential of different forms of program interventions. Using the tools helps to reveal the impact that various interventions can have on local health inequities.

Acknowledgement of Traditional Land

We wish to acknowledge this land on which the Wellesley Institute operates. For thousands of years, it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.

Revised by the Ceremonial Committee at the University of Toronto Office of Indigenous Initiatives in April 2021.