CHIA - Capital Investment Health Impact Assessment

"The Economic determinants of health - including income level, employment status, job quality, wealth and pay - have a strong influence on people's opportunities to live health lives" (Health Foundation, 2020)

Glasgow City Region (GCR) continues to experience start economic and health inequalities. Large scale investements present a huge opportunity to address these. To tackle this challenge, we need to explore how capital investment impacts on health and equity and find new ways of maximising the positive health and equity impacts of major investments in GCR.

Historically, large scale investments have primarily focused on economic outcomes and have had much less focus on delivering improvements in health, inclusion or equity. Nevertheless, investment decisions in economic development can and do have important impacts on health and equity, for better or worse.

The CHIA toolkit is intended to support practitioners to maximise population health and wellbeing outcomes and mitigate inequalities in capital investment decisions. The CHIA toolkit is about paying attention to the strong reciprocal relationship between public health and economic development.

By actively considering the connection between economic decisons and health outcomes, it is possible to maximise the health benefits of capital investment, and to mitigate or minimise negative outcomes.