HIA-CLIC: A national clearinghouse to collect and disseminate information on health impact assessment practice and methods

Despite growing interest, the field of HIA suffers from a lack of organization, standards and practical guidance. There are a few HIA clearinghouses based outside the U.S., but while these websites provide a great deal of HIA content and methodology, they tend to not be educational, engaging, user-friendly, or up-to-date.

The UCLA HIA Group is creating a national HIA clearinghouse, the Health Impact Assessment Clearinghouse, Learning and Information Center (HIA-CLIC), to provide public health practitioners, agency officials and policy-makers with comprehensive information about HIAs completed in the U.S., HIA methodologies, and background information on the diverse pathways through which policies and changes in the built environment affect health. Session attendees will learn about and how to use HIA-CLIC, including its multiple indexes, background sections and embedded learning modules.

While the primary goal of HIA-CLIC is to build HIA capacity and disseminate HIA practice by reducing technical and resource barriers to HIA in the U.S., HIA-CLIC will be a useful tool even for those individuals and organizations that are not interested in conducting their own HIAs. Wherever they are located, public health practitioners, planners, environmental scientists, policy makers and others will be able to use HIA-CLIC to more fully understand how the public's health is affected by a ange of policies outside the traditional purview of health departments. By raising such awareness and stimulating appropriate policy responses, HIA-CLIC will help support efforts to shape a new, broader, more effective vision of public health.