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Bringing health into transportation and land use scenario planning: Creating a National Public Health Assessment Model (N-PHAM)
Citation:
Schoner, J., J. Chapman, A. Brookes, K. MacLeod, E. Fox, N. Iroz-Elardo, AND L. Frank. Bringing health into transportation and land use scenario planning: Creating a National Public Health Assessment Model (N-PHAM). Journal of Transport & Health. Elsevier B.V., Amsterdam, Netherlands, 10:401-418, (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2018.04.008
Impact/Purpose:
Urban planners will now be able to evaluate the health impacts for planned changes to the built environment. The health impact assessment plugin will plug into a variety of urban planning tools and allow planners to make comparisons between a baseline and multiple scenarios on the prevalence and cost of chronic disease within the planning area. This paper contributes to SHC 1.61.
Description:
There is mounting evidence linking land development and transportation investments with physical activity and diet as health behaviors important for chronic disease prevention. In addition, natural elements within an urban setting provide many physical and mental health benefits. Links between the physical environment and health have traditionally focused on harmful exposures such as air pollution, noise, and traffic injury. Land use and transportation strategies that create sustainable development offer both health and environmental benefits. Given limited funds and competition for how and where investments are made, there is a need to prioritize and target resources to maximize health benefits (including obesity reduction and chronic disease prevention). The ability to apply health and built environment evidence to decision making has been limited by the complexity and inconsistency of research methods and lack of a direct measurable connection with the planning contexts in which decisions need to be made. Scenario planning tools were created for this exact reason and provide a method to apply evidence to spatial planning decisions at a range of geographic scales. Scenario planning tools predict a range of outcomes traversing environmental, mobility, economic and others in association with contrasting land development and transportation investment strategies. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is funding Urban Design 4 Health (www.ud4h.com) to build on their experience of bringing health into scenario planning. The product is called “N-PHAM” or the National Public Health Assessment Module. N-PHAM is designed to interface with multiple scenario planning tool platforms and predict health outcomes. The end product is an evidence-based tool for health impact assessments that can be widely used in planning practice. It can empower communities to choose investments that have the greatest effect on health, quality of life, health care costs, and environmental justice related disparities. The goal of this study is to develop a method to integrate evidence on the health impacts of alterative growth patterns and further assess cost. As far as the authors are aware, N-PHAM is the first health assessment tool that can connect to multiple existing scenario planning tools and is also broadly and consistently applicable nationally. In addition to support from the EPA, N-PHAM is supported through a major effort to create a National Environmental-Measures Database (NED) funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Built and natural environment data at the block-group level and large population surveys were utilized to model the relationships of the environment with health outcomes (obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, respiratory ailments, and depression) for a range of age and income groups.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Bringing health into transportation and land use scenario planning: Creating a National Public Health Assessment Model (N-PHAM)