Dataset Information

Investigating underlying principles to guide health impact assessment.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Many countries conduct Health Impact Assessment (HIA) of their projects and policies to predict their positive and negative health impacts. In recent years many guides have been developed to inform HIA practice, largely reflecting local developments in HIA. These guides have often been designed for specific contexts and specific need, making the choice between guides difficult. The objective of the current study is to identify underlying principles in order to guide HIA practice in Iran. METHODS: This study was conducted in three stages: 1) Studies comparing HIA guidelines were reviewed to identify criteria used for comparison seeking emphasized principles. 2) The HIA characteristics extracted from published papers were categorized in order to determine the principles that could guide HIA practice. 3) Finally, these principles were agreed by experts using nominal group technique. RESULTS: The review of the studies comparing HIA guides demonstrated there are no clear comparison criteria for reviewing HIA guides and no study mentioned HIA principles. Investigating the HIA principles from peer-reviewed papers, we found 14 issues. These were, considering of general features in planning and conducting HIAs such as HIA stream, level, timing and type, considering of the wider socio-political and economic context, considering of economic, technical and legal aspects of HIA and capacities for HIA, rationality and comprehensiveness, using appropriate evidence, elaborating on HIA relation to other forms of Impact Assessment, considering of equity, and encouraging intersectoral and interdisciplinary cooperation, involvement of stakeholders and transparency as underlying principles to guide HIA practice. The results emphasize how critical these technical as well as tactical considerations are in the early scoping step of an HIA which plans the conduct of the HIA in reponse to local contextual issues. CONCLUSION: Determining the principles of HIA from peer-reviewed papers provides an opportunity for guiding HIA practice comprehensively. It seems to be feasible to develop a universal guide that covers all principles required.

SUBMITTER: Fakhri A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4075098 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundFollowing approximately 10 years from the beginning of Iran's national Health Technology Assessment (HTA) programme, the present study aims to evaluate its success by examining the impact of HTA and identifying the determinant factors leading to the implementation of HTA report results.MethodsThe triangulation method was employed herein. HTA reports were initially identified and their impact and determinant factors were then examined from the perspectives of both researchers (by preparing a questionnaire according to the Payback model and sending it to HTA principle investigators) and stakeholders (semi-structured interviews held with each HTA stakeholder). Simultaneously, the quality of the HTA reports was examined with relevant critical appraisal checklists.ResultsThe impact of 19 equipment technologies and four pharmaceutical technologies were assessed in this study. Twenty researchers replied (response rate, 86.96%) to the questionnaire on the impact of HTA reports from the researcher's perspective. To assess the impact of HTA reports from the stakeholder's perspective, seven policy-makers were chosen and interviewed as the main target audience. The most common step taken to disseminate the results of the HTA projects was publication. Conducting the HTA had taught researchers and their colleagues' new skills and had facilitated the securing of research grants from other organisations. Most reports had used the systematic review method but the relevant details had been scarcely presented regarding outcomes, costs and analysis. The greatest impact of HTA reports on decision-making had been on policy-makers providing and allocating finances. Barriers in stewardship, identification and prioritisation of topics, performance and dissemination of HTA results were the main barriers of implementing HTAs.ConclusionsIn most aspects, the status of HTA impact reports need improvement. Thus far, the barriers and facilitators of the HTA programme in Iran have been investigated in other studies. These findings should be pooled to reach a solution that can be actively applied to the health system to improve the status quo of HTA in Iran.

Project description:BackgroundMetabolic coupling of product synthesis and microbial growth is a prominent approach for maximizing production performance. Growth-coupling (GC) also helps stabilizing target production and allows the selection of superior production strains by adaptive laboratory evolution. To support the implementation of growth-coupling strain designs, we seek to identify biologically relevant, metabolic principles that enforce strong growth-coupling on the basis of reaction knockouts.ResultsWe adapted an established bilevel programming framework to maximize the minimally guaranteed production rate at a fixed, medium growth rate. Using this revised formulation, we identified various GC intervention strategies for metabolites of the central carbon metabolism, which were examined for GC generating principles under diverse conditions. Curtailing the metabolism to render product formation an essential carbon drain was identified as one major strategy generating strong coupling of metabolic activity and target synthesis. Impeding the balancing of cofactors and protons in the absence of target production was the underlying principle of all other strategies and further increased the GC strength of the aforementioned strategies.ConclusionMaximizing the minimally guaranteed production rate at a medium growth rate is an attractive principle for the identification of strain designs that couple growth to target metabolite production. Moreover, it allows for controlling the inevitable compromise between growth coupling strength and the retaining of microbial viability. With regard to the corresponding metabolic principles, generating a dependency between the supply of global metabolic cofactors and product synthesis appears to be advantageous in enforcing strong GC for any metabolite. Deriving such strategies manually, is a hard task, due to which we suggest incorporating computational metabolic network analyses in metabolic engineering projects seeking to determine GC strain designs.

Dataset Information

Investigating underlying principles to guide health impact assessment.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets