Research Summaries: Some Links

For practitioners interested in integrating health research into planning and design, the task can be daunting. There are many articles that touch on the topic of the connection between people, health, and place but with varying levels of relevance, research quality, and cost (and many can be quite expensive to those who don’t have university library subscriptions). Into the gap have come a number of organizations creating practice-oriented research summaries.

InformeDesign summarizes many articles, and has an easy search interface, which is very helpful: http://www.informedesign.org/Default.aspx. To find syntheses that evaluate the balance of evidence one needs to go to other sources.

UCLA HIA-CLIC has some helpful summaries of research organized by sector (e.g transportation) and pathway (e.g air quality) http://www.hiaguide.org/sectors-and-causal-pathways. Not every issues has information—a number are forthcoming—but it’s generally a helpful site.

Design for Health’s research summaries are now 3 or 4 years old: http://designforhealth.net/resources/researchsummaries.html. This is more of a problem in the area of physical activity and food—where there has been a lot of recent research—than in the other topics where there are fewer new studies. For those wanting to get updated research there are larger topical pages listing other resources: http://designforhealth.net/resources/generalhealthissues.html and a list of web sites by topic is available at http://designforhealth.net/resources/websites.html.

UN Habitat Reports on Health

UN Habitat produces and distributes a large number of reports, many related to health with numerous publications on water infrastructure, social inclusion, disaster management, housing issues, and climate change. Although you can buy printed reports that isn’t always necessary as many can be found for free.

Hidden Cities: Unmasking and Overcoming Health Inequities in Urban Settings (2010), produced in collaboration with the World Health Organization, provides a good overview of the history and current situation in terms of cities and health. Topics cange across the natural and build environment, social and conomic issues, food secutiy, health services, and general urban governange http://www.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=3049

Diagram from Hidden Cities

Collection of Municipal Solid Waste , Key issues for Decision-makers in Developing Countries (2011) grapples with an important problem in public health. Written in a very accessible style it answers practical questions about how too extend solid waste collection to a wider population. http://www.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=3231

A Global Assessment on Women’t Safety (2008) focuses on tools for enhancing safety including public education, adviacey, participatory approaches, and changing public spaces. It’s part of a series of reports on this topic http://www.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=2848

Planning for Healthy Places with Health Impact Assessments

A screenshot of the online slide show

A few years back the American Planning Association in association with the National Association of County and City Health Officials created the online course Planning for Healthy Places with Health Impact Assessments at http://professional.captus.com/Planning/hia/default.aspx. Don’t be put off by the initial survey that you have to fill in to get into the site—it’s short and you don’t need to be an APA member to access it! Sponsored by the Centers for Disease control and Prevention the initial course was developed by Rajiv Bhatia, Laura Biazzo, MPH, Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Brian Cole, Andrew Dannenberg, Carrie Fesperman, and Candace Rutt.

With Christine Green from APA and Nisha Bochwey from the University of Virginia I’ve worked to update the program (without changing the voiceover except for one short additional module!)—Christine is the maven of resources and Nisha did a stellar job on quizzes. There are a lot of new examples. The computer generated voice is a bit weird but the content is a good introduction to HIA—and thanks to the CDC it’s free.