Health in All Policies Recommendations

Policy

The Lane County Board of Commissioners should consider passing a resolution in support of implementing healthy public policies. Model language for this type of policy can be found in King County's Health Equity Initiative, the National Association of City and County Health Officials HiAP position statement (http://www.naccho.org/advocacy/positions/upload/12-01-health-in-all-policies.pdf), and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials HiAP position statement (http://www.astho.org/Policy-and-Position-Statements/Position-Statement-on-Health-in-All-Policies/). Other local agencies, for example the Eugene and Springfield City Councils, could learn from the piloting of this approach and potentially adopt a similar strategy in the future.

The Oregon Health Authority and Oregon Department of Transportation have recently co-signed an MOU stating their intent to collaborate on health in all policies work related to transportation (ftp://ftp.odot.state.or.us/outgoing/OTC/12_December/). Lane County agency leadership and policymakers should be made aware of this MOU, and agency staff should consider how it may support similar collaboration at the local level.

Communication

Lane Livability Consortium members should plan to continue the cross-agency communication that has been supported by the project (perhaps with an email list or through agency-to-agency conference calls or meetings, in particular when there is a window of opportunity to include health in plans or policies in other sectors).

Data Sharing

Lane County agencies should use specific projects, such as the Housing HIA and regional scenario planning, to improve agency-to-agency data sharing and staff capacity to use public health data and models.

Lane County agencies should use the data resources developed by the Livability
Consortium, for example, the equity and opportunity maps and the assessment of community and regional plans, to consider health impacts in other projects.

Projects and plans

Lane County and City of Eugene and Springfield staff working on updates to the regional comprehensive plans and transportation system plans should explicitly include health impacts in those plans, either in separate sections about health, or integrated into other relevant sections of the plans.

Lane County Public Health Division should use health impact assessment to inform the development of health-related criteria for the City of Eugene's investments in affordable housing.

Lane County and City staff in other sectors should participate in the Public Health Division's committees to implement the Community Health Improvement Plan.