Policy is how we advance healthy communities, and is key to supporting the physical and social components of a healthy and safe built environment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention created Health in All Policies (HiAP) as a shared approach to improving public health by incorporating health considerations into policy decisions across sectors. HiAP reaches beyond traditional “silos” of decision-making to generate comprehensive solutions. Safety, support, sustainability, and equity are core considerations of this approach, and the goal is to improve health outcomes for people at every stage of life. An HiAP approach to governance can be enacted at all levels.
Change Lab Solutions, a national organization devoted to health policy innovation, offers a start-to-finish Guide for State and Local Government on developing and implementing Health in All Policies. Model policies available in the toolkit focus on transforming how government agencies consider health throughout the decision-making process. Other resources from this organization include creative funding strategies; ways to form cross-sector collaborations; and special policy topics such as tobacco, childhood obesity, and healthy and affordable housing.