Towards a composite tool for health planning

Context: Current health promotion efforts largely focus on how to „reach“ individuals, and how to assist them in changing their health-related behavior, whereas circumstantial factors tend to receive much less attention. There is, however, a current surge of interest in the health implications of city and regional planning, and increasing demand for tools assisting the adequate coverage of health in such situations. Methods and Materials: Using expert knowledge and literature searches, a variety of (English-language) sources, published within the last decade and containing „tool“ information, was identified. Based on these sources and on perceived needs of adaptation for Germany, the approaches were synthesized into one comprehensive German-language tool. Using a set of criteria, the tool is now subjected to critical appraisal and feedback by practitioners and students, both in public health and in spatial planning sciences. Results: The set of existing tools used for this analysis contains eight tools, incl. four from WHO sources and two from the USA. The tools differ widely, e.g. they imply simple checklists or multi-dimensional arrays. The newly synthesized tool consists of two matrices. Based on an extended „settings“ concept, the second matrix reflects nearly 20 different domains of life, summarized into six groups. It aims at assisting efforts to combine routes of primary and secondary prevention with approaches of disease treatment and health economy, e.g. private homes as a location of health care. The paper also presents feedback from both the public health and the (spatial) planning arenas. Conclusions: The synthesized tool meets with considerable interest. It remains open for now which modifications will be necessary for it to prove useful for planning concepts and their implementation. Additional areas of potential application include health targets and indicators development, burden of disease modeling, and „Health in all policies“ approaches.