Community-Driven Health-Impact Assessment: A Promising PATH for Promoting Community Learning and Social Responsibility for Health

The Healthy Public Policy And Health Impact Assessment Context

Successive global health promotion agreements, most notably the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (WHO, 1986) and the Jakarta Declaration on Health Promotion into the 21st Century (WHO, 1997), have advocated building healthy public policy as a key action front for global health development. A healthy public policy is a policy that increases the health and wellbeing of those individuals and communities that it affects (Kemm, 2001). It is oriented to the future state of health, to multiple small-scale solutions, and to the involvement of individuals and the local community in those solutions (Hancock, 1985; Mittelmark, 2001). The emphasis is on refocusing a preoccupation in public policy with the existing sick care system, to a focus on creating health (Hancock & Minkler, 2002). The development of healthy public policy relies heavily on adult learning; it recognizes that people know a great deal about what affects their health, and can be involved in planning action to improve individual and community health and wellbeing (Coady, 2009). A recent report of the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health (WHO, 2008) reinforces that healthy public policy—focused on improving the circumstances in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age—is now more important than ever.