How Do People Connect Places and Health in Practice?

I am often asked how to connect health and place, practically. There are two main ways of thinking about this--one relates to topics and another to methods.

In terms of topics there are several lists available. Most end out looking like the following list, adapted from Design for Health (http://www.designforhealth.net/resources/generalhealthissues.html). However other, quite similar, lists exist (http://www.hiaguide.org/sectors-and-causal-pathways/pathways). They mix health issues and environmental features mainly because different issues are thought about in those terms. They also play out differently for various groups including children, seniors, people with low incomes, and so on.

Self-build housing in Beihai, China

• Accessibility to places, people, and services that can promote health
• Air quality
• Disasters--including climate change
• Environment + housing quality related to pollutants
• Food quality
• Healthcare access
• Mental health--often related to stress (e.g. plants can reduct stress)
• Noise
• Physical activity options
• Safety—from accidents and crime
• Social capital/connections--with complicated relations to place
• Water quality

A range of methods help practitioners make these connections:

1. Policy and Program Collaborations: The UN Healthy Cities Program is an example, focusing on building awareness and collaboration among partners including governments and universities.
2. Health Impact Assessments: These are actually a range of tools, both participatory and technical, aiming to link local knowledge and health research/data maximize health benefits+ minimize health risks for all groups. They can be done on a range of policies, programs, and plans, not only ones affecting places.
3. Quality of Life Tools: This is a term for a range or preexisting tools and methods that focus on the connection of people and place, and connections between people. Examples include safety audits, food security assessments, and asset maps. Various social development tools such as anti-racism trainings with a place-based approach, also fit in this category.
4. Healthy Community Plans and Designs: Such proposals translate health research into practice at scales from the building to the region.

Tools: The National Collaborative for Childhood Obesity Research Measure Registry

Recently I highlighted work of the National Collaborative for Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR). a group spearheaded by the National Institute of Health, Centers for Disease Control, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They have now released a new tool, or rather a registry of measures related to diet and physical activity: http://tools.nccor.org/measures/. I was part of the team on this project. My role was cataloging some of the physical activity measures, a mix of “questionnaires, instruments, diaries, logs, electronic devices, direct observations of people or environments, protocols, and analytic techniques.” Overall there are over 700 measures.

Example of Straight Line and Network
Buffers Created Using GI

The main search page at http://tools.nccor.org/measures/ allows users to search by domain (e.g. Individual dietary behavior, food environment…), measure type, age of people measured (though as this information seems to have been unevenly cataloged I found it not so useful for environmental measures), and context or type of place. Measures with reliability and validity information, as well as those used in studies of children and adolescents, were given priority. However, for the domain of physical activity environments this would have limited the measures too much so these are drawn from a wider range of sources.