Health impact assessments provide an opportunity to reflect on the various impacts a project has on the long-term wellbeing of residents impacted by that development. Health Impact assessments pick up on issues important to local residents and are most powerful if integrated with community consultation. 

Rather than seeing the requirement of a health impact assessment as an additional box-ticking exercise, leading developers emphasise the health and wellbeing part of their placemaking agenda from the start. This fits in with the increasing adoption of health impacts as validation requirement in planning applications.  

Developers such as Redrow, Countryside, or Igloo have well-established placemaking frameworks, which also capture wider factors of their developments beyond the specs of residential units.

Benefits of tying community consultation to health impacts

With health impact metrics underly the construction project from the start, community consultation can be tied back to productive talking points, such as walkability, access, services, and build environment features, which are crucial to healthy, happy residents.

Project owners picking up on resident concerns can generate better suited local developments. For architects, direct community consultation on health impacts puts real-life stories to the problems identified through the brief.

Community engagement can indentify if features relevant to the health outcomes are usable; and identify options to improve them. This is not only useful for considering what is provided on site, but can also be addressed through contributions, such as the Community Infrastructure Levy or negotiated developer contributions. 

Public engagement adds the following to construction projects that focus on health and wellbeing. 

What public engagement can you do?

For public engagement and consultation, consultation methods will always be influenced by project scale, the type of neighbourhood, and other factors.

However, from a process point of view, there are three types of Health Impact Assessments with increasing scope (read more in our insights article on Health Impact Assessments). These are ‘desktop’ reviews, ‘rapid’ more extensive reviews, and, lastly, comprehensive appraisals with an in-depth work programme alongside design proposals development (see HUDU Rapid HIA guidance p5). 

For public engagement activities, large complex projects will draw on face-to-face meetings or focus groups, especially if the construction project is controversial or has significant impacts, such as a mine.

Some of the popular engagement methods for Health Impact Assessments include: 

In many cases, a streamlined approach using a well-informed place baseline and online community consultations would be sufficient for residential projects.

Incorporating evidence and resident feedback on health impacts

What level of engagement is done naturally depends on the scope of the project. 

For comprehensive HIAs and, in most cases, even rapid HIAs, a low-cost, high-impact engagement activity that can reach a broad audience would certainly be preferred to see how the wider area is used. This can easily be done with the PlaceChangers Engagement tool. 

A good starting point is a well-informed place baseline for the site, capturing the local population's current socio-demographics and health issues. In the second step, this place baseline should ideally notice the presence and provision of built environment assets that impact health and well-being.

A community area appraisal can focus on specific built environment features of interest to Health Impact Assessment. Some built environment features relevant to HIAs are listed below. These features come from a review of the rapid Health Impact Assessment frameworks for London and Essex: 

As part of your community consultation, you can then invite feedback on the wider area. Consider activities such as:

Takeaways: Linking community consultation with health impacts

Incorporate the concerns raised in health impact assessments into your regular placemaking strategy to avoid seeing health impact assessments as box-ticking exercises.

Once health impacts are considered, community consultation can pick up on planning issues that the construction project can influence, either with more suitable on-site plans or appropriate off-site mitigations (see our article: Making the most of your developer contributions).

Digital tools can help with two things: they can support the generation of the relevant evidence in a short amount of time (see Place reports and the PlaceChangers Site Insights tool), and allow you to incorporate community feedback (see PlaceChangers Interactive Consultation tool)

Key takeaways are: