HIA - Health Impact Assessment

HIA at Deakin University

Our goal is:
to promote and champion the use of health impact assessment (HIA) as a means of enhancing population health and reducing inequalities in health within a range of organisations, either informally or through formal legislated requirements, so that considerations about health become the norm in policy making and planning.

Our role is:
to provide research and academic leadership, education and training, consultancy and partnerships, and infrastructure support, so that organisations and individuals will have the capacity to determine the potential or actual impacts of policies, programs and projects in both public and private arenas on the health and wellbeing of individuals, families and communities.

HIA is grounded in the principles of a social model of health.

We support the following definition of health:
both a collective and an inter-generational continuum encompassing a holistic perspective incorporating four distinct shared dimensions of life... the spiritual, the intellectual, physical and emotional. Linking these four fundamental dimensions, health and survival manifests itself on multiple levels where the past, present, and future co-exist simultaneously.

Reference:
World Health Organisation (1999) The Geneva Declaration on the health and survival of Indigenous peoples. Geneva, WHO Committee on Indigenous Health: 4.