By Joshua Waimberg, JD
Beginning in the early 2000s, there was a push in the public health world for jurisdictions and localities in the United States to adopt a Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach similar to recent initiatives in Europe. At its core, HiAP is a collaborative approach to improve the public’s health by incorporating health into decision-making across sectors and policy areas.
According to the Public Health Institute, HiAP is centered around five core elements: promoting health and equity, supporting intersectoral collaboration, creating co-benefits for multiple partners, engaging stakeholders, and creating structural or process change. It can be adopted at all levels of government, and jurisdictions that adopt HiAP approaches do so to ensure that all decision-makers and stakeholders work together to improve the health of their communities.
The Policy Surveillance Program, with support from the Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, has just published that detail state-level HiAP bills and laws that were proposed or passed between the start of 2012 and the end of 2016. Read More