Community health impact assessment in Ghana: contemporary concepts and practical methods

Aboagye, Da Costa, Akuffo, Kwame and Khan, Hafiz T.A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1817-3730 (2019) Community health impact assessment in Ghana: contemporary concepts and practical methods. INQUIRY: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing, 56. ISSN 0046-9580

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Abstract

It has long been recognised that health and its determinants are strongly influenced by policies, programmes and projects outside of the healthcare sector. Few countries have introduced health impact assessments (HIA) to try and ensure that probable impacts on health are considered. An appropriate health impact assessment regime will identify negative and positive impacts of proposed health policies and programmes on health, enable the interpretation of health risk and potential health gain, and present the information to assist in decision making. These HIAs are often generic and rapid desk-based appraisals characterised by the use of information and evidence that is already available or easily accessible and generally undertaken by administrators in an organisation to gain a snapshot of the health impacts to inform proposal direction. Rapid and generic desk-based assessments require less-intensive effort and resources and draws on existing data sources from scientific peer-reviewed and grey literature to analyse potential health impacts. However, both sources can also be used to determining whether a more detailed review is necessary. The Community HIA model proposed by this work departs from the generic and rapid desk- based appraisals and is intended to provide practical evidence to give higher priority to people’s viewpoints, promote participation, understanding and incorporate community voices to help shape future policy, programmes and practice. A comprehensive review of Ghana’s National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) was carried out using the generic desk based HIA approach. This was followed by a practical qualitative community field work. In this research we have demonstrated how community HIA is to be conducted through an actual case study in the Ghanaian West African context. The scope of this work is wide and incorporates the consideration of key concepts and possible methods for carrying out HIA at the community level.

Item Type: Article
Identifier: 10.1177/0046958019845292
Additional Information: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Keywords: community health impact assessment, contemporary concepts, practical methods, National Health Insurance Scheme, research, public health
Subjects: Medicine and health > Health promotion and public health
Depositing User: Hafiz T.A. Khan
Date Deposited: 29 Mar 2019 19:52
Last Modified: 06 Feb 2024 15:59
URI: https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/5895

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