The following pre-conference training workshops will be held from 14.00-17.00 on 8 October 2008 at Blackburne House Conference Centre, Blackburne Place, Off Hope Street, Liverpool L8 7PE.  

Location map

Attendance is free of charge and places will be allocated in order of receipt of bookings. Pre-conference workshops are only open to delegates attending the conference.

Liz Green
Welsh Health Impact Assessment Support Unit, UK
Chloe Chadderton
Welsh Health Impact Assessment Support Unit, UK
Debbie Fox
University of Liverpool, UK
Karen Chambers
Flintshire County Council, UK

• A basic understanding of HIA, what it is and how it is done
• Introduction to different influences on health and wellbeing
• Practical experience of having a go!
• Networking opportunities

Format:

This 3 hour workshop session aims to quickly and practically give practitioners who have little or no knowledge of HIA an overview and understanding of ‘how to do’ a HIA. Participants will examine current screening and scoping tools, work through scenarios to identify health and wellbeing impacts, discuss evidence and its nature, recommendations and any mitigation.

Numbers are limited and allocated to those who apply earliest.

Workshop – 2pm – 5pm:

• Introductions (LG)
• Methodology – presentation by Debbie Fox
• Tools and Methods
• a Screening – breakout groups looking at examples of screening tools and their strengths and weaknesses. Feedback. (DF)
  b Scoping – breakout groups looking at examples of scoping checklists and how to use them. Feedback. (LG)
• Break for refreshments
• Evidence and Appraisal – presentation by Chloe Chadderton on the types and nature of evidence
• Identifying potential positive/negative impacts – breakout groups quickly working through the wider determinants of health (KC)
• Recommendations and Mitigation – examining previous HIA’s (LG)
• Feedback and Evaluation

Anthea Cooke and Lynn Snowden
Inukshuk Consultancy, UK

The aim of the toolkit is to:

• Raise awareness and understanding of mental wellbeing;
• Enable a range of stakeholders to begin to identify the impact a particular policy, service, programme or project may be having on mental well-being;
• Encourage stakeholders to explore ways to maximise potential positive impacts and minimise potential negative ones;
• Enable stakeholders to explore and develop local indicators to monitor and evaluate progress on promoting mental wellbeing.

The toolkit will support implementation of key cross government policy in addressing wellbeing, enabling localities to maximise the potential of existing work in having a positive impact on community wellbeing.

Internationally, mental health impact assessment has been recognised as an important action to improve population health. The European Union Mental Health Action Plan for Europe (WHO 2005) calls for action to “assess the potential impact of any new policy on the mental well-being of the population before its introduction and evaluate its results afterwards.” (p.4). This has been further supported in the European Green Paper on Mental Health (Commission of the European Communities, 2005) .

This pre-conference training will introduce participants to the MWIA process and criteria; and, enable consideration as to how MWIA might be applied in their locations.

Odile Mekel
Institute of Health and Work, Germany
Thomas Classen
University of Bielefeld, Germany

In a half day training, participants will get insight in the following aspects of quantifying health impacts:

• different quantification approaches (health risk assessment, comparative risk assessment, burden of disease, probabilistic risk assessment etc.) incl. strengths and limitations
• international data sources / data bases
• software tools available
• guidelines available
• interpretation and communication of results.

These aspects will be illustrated and discussed by selected examples.

Basic understanding of epidemiological methods by the participants would be favourable.