Health Impact Assessment for Healthy Cities

With rapid urbanization, changing demographics, increasing communicable diseases including pandemic threats and the impact of climate change, it is becoming clear that cities as centers of living and working need to provide healthier conditions for their populations. 

Countries are implementing Universal Health Coverage (UHC) focusing on three dimensions: i) increasing coverage of services, ii) enhancing quality of care and iii) protecting households from getting into poverty from catastrophic health expenditures. To achieve UHC requires countries to also address the social determinants of health using a multi-sectoral approach. There is significant interest in how to better account for the contribution of non-health sectors to health outcomes using various tools including Health Impact Assessment. Additional emphasis on health outcomes will contribute to greater economic viability of urban development.