Process and impact evaluation of the Greater Christchurch Urban Development Strategy Health Impact Assessment

using multiple qualitative methodologies including key informant interviews, focus groups and questionnaires, this study performs process and impact evaluations of the Christchurch HIA including evaluation of costs and resource use;the evaluation found that the HIA had demonstrable direct impacts on planning and implementation of the final Urban Development Strategy as well as indirect impacts on understandings and ways of working within and between organisations. It also points out future directions and ways of working in this successful collaboration between public health and local government authorities. It summarises the modest resource use and discusses the important role HIA can play in urban planning with intersectoral collaboration and enhanced relationships as both catalysts and outcomes of the HIA process;as one of the few evaluations of HIA that have been published to date, this paper makes a substantial contribution to the literature on the impact, utility and effectiveness of HIA.Health impact assessment (HIA) has been promoted for over twenty years as a way to enhance the potential effects of a policy or strategy "on the health of a population, and the distribution of those effects within the population " [1]. HIA uses a mixture of quantitative and qualitative predictive methods and community consultation to identify, and where possible quantify, a specific proposal's direct and indirect impacts on health [2]. Impact assessment has been used in New Zealand in the environmental field for many years [2-5]. More recently HIA has been promoted to assess the impacts of national and local policy on health, wellbeing and equity. The New Zealand Health Strategy includes HIA of policy under Objective One [6]. HIA particularly seeks to consider the impact of policy on health inequalities.Although the term 'health inequalities' is relatively new, the effect of urbanisation to disadvantage the poor was noted over one hundred and fifty years ago. Urban planning pla