Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #109296

Thomas A. Farley, MD, MPH, Community Health Sciences, Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, 1440 Canal Street, New Orleans, LA 70112, 504 588-5391, tfarley@tulane.edu and Deborah A. Cohen, MD, MPH, Health, RAND Corporation, 1700 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA 90405.

While many acknowledge that the built environment influences health-related behaviors and health, we lack frameworks for understanding these influences and approaches to promoting health by modifying the built environment. In this presentation we will provide a framework for considering structural factors that influence key health-related behaviors such as smoking, diet, sedentary lifestyle, and alcohol consumption. The four structural factors are: 1) accessibility of consumer products, 2) physical structures, 3) social structures, and 4) media messages. The amplifying role of social influences on group-level health behavior will be discussed to explain how subtle aspects of these structural factors can lead to large population-wide effects. The health benefits of modifying these structural factors have been demonstrated in the last 40 years in the fields of injury prevention and smoking prevention. Motor vehicle crash deaths have fallen as injury prevention experts shifted their focus from “driver error” to building safer cars and highways. Smoking rates have fallen as smoking prevention experts have shifted their focus from school-based education to indoor smoking bans and cigarette taxes. We will discuss the commonalities of these fields and how the lessons learned from them are being applied in other areas. The presentation will then provide an introduction to the following three presentations, which provide specific examples of environmental influences on health and environmental approaches to influencing key health-related behaviors and health.

Learning Objectives:

• 1) To understand how the built environment influences important health behaviors beyond physical activity
• 2) To develop a theoretical framework for understanding environmental influences on behaviors and health.
• 3)To describe specific changes to the built environment which would reduce key unhealthy behaviors and enhance healthy behaviors
• 4)To describe barriers and opportunities to implement health-promoting changes to the built environment.

Keywords: Environment, Prevention

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.