Community Health & Impact Assessments
WHAT IS THIS PROGRAMME?
This programme has been co-developed with grassroots organisations in the UK. It is a programme designed to help community groups explore factors that drive health outcomes, the systems that underpin them, and the documents and practices that are applied.
This work aims to throw away the rule book on the status quo and imagine what an HIA could look like if it embodied the WHO four interlinking pillars of democracy, equity, ethical use of evidence, and sustainable development from a community and lived experience framing.
About the Programme
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It takes grassroots community organisers on a journey in learning about health. An open-access educational journey guides people to learn about urban factors that influence their health.
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The methods by which institutions and organisations design strategies and practices fail to capture a scientific understanding of susceptibility and the intersectionality of health determinants. This programme is designed to support community advocates to defineadvocates define this relationship in their local areas and work with partners to influence the documents and policies that govern them.
Lastly, Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) are said by the WHO to provide decision-makers and stakeholders with comprehensive information about the consequences on health of interventions, policies, and projects. They are an existing area of policy widely applied at various levels of government action, therefore there is a great opportunity to bring innovative solutions to existing problems.
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The programme is roughly 3/5s of the way through and the Centric Lab team are reviewing how the 2024 learning programme went. The results of this will involve reviewing the existing literature, tools, and learning programme we aim to make available.
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We are looking for local authority or institutional partners to model what an HIA looks like in their area when redefined by communities.
We will be updating the next steps of the learning programme in Q2 of 2025.
LATEST OUTPUT
The Making of our Health Impact Assessment
There is no defined HIA template, only guidance; the London NHS HUDU template greatly differs from the Public Health Wales HIA on the health impacts of climate change.
This means that it is malleable as opposed to other technical guidance - perhaps an ironic benefit of there being no definition of health in the context of urban planning (via the National Planning Policy Framework).
This piece documents the process that was taken in how we created our Community Health Impact Assessment.
We've done this to show what journey we took in the aims of transparency and hopefully inspiration to others.
What Participants Are Saying
“The course was extremely well marketed: the tone and register was welcoming, encouraging, engaging and open about learning and sharing knowledge it was very accessible but also a massive commitment because the learning becomes a part of everyday life. It's like learning as medicine.”
“The evening sessions were fascinating, I learned a lot from all the presenters. The flexibility in how we could spend the funding was very welcome, it allowed us to create something that was really relevant to our local communities.”
Programme Outputs
A selection of works from this area of work.
If you want to read more, go to the Research Library.
Partner With Us
We work ecosystemically. We recognise that the pathway to the abolition of systems that create health injustices cannot be done alone. We always welcome approaches for partnerships with like-minded organisations to help drive our collective missions forward.
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