The aim of the review was to identify the overall strengths and weaknesses of the Learning by Doing HIA reports and develop recommendations for the commissioning, implementation, reporting and evaluation/review of future HIAs.
When judged against the Review Package criteria, the majority of HIAs were judged to be good or satisfactory. The review highlighted several strengths common to almost all of the reports, in particular good engagement with stakeholders and consideration of wider determinants of health. However, the review also highlighted various areas for improvement across the HIA reports, some of which may relate to the fundamentals of HIA practice such as the impact assessment stage and analysis of distribution of effects.
Recommendations in four areas are provided, aimed at building on current strengths, as well as addressing identified weaknesses, in current HIA practice in this country.
Purpose
The aim of this review is to identify the overall strengths and weaknesses of the Learning by Doing HIA reports and develop recommendations for the commissioning, implementation, reporting and evaluation/review of future HIAs.The overall success and usefulness of any impact assessment approach (including HIA) largely depends on the quality of the impact assessments conducted (Lee and Colley 1992). Therefore, quality control and continuous improvement are important aspects of HIA capacity building. It should be noted that this review only evaluates the process and impact of the HIA based on the information given in each report. The review package includes questions about how well the HIA process is described, since a good HIA report should describe the methods and procedure in detail. However, a limitation of the current review is that where such detail has not been included in reports, it is impossible for reviewers to distinguish between poor reporting and poor process.