Planning for Public Health

Local governments prepare a variety of plans to assess and address challenges in areas ranging from housing and economic development to land use and transportation. The integration of health issues into all dimensions of plan making at the local and regional levels is an important societal goal. 

Comprehensive Planning

Not all local governments across the U.S. are required to develop a comprehensive plan, but many jurisdictions that do create a comprehensive plan are beginning to include goals and objectives that promote public health. Mandatory elements such as land use, open space, and transportation, as well as urban design requirements, can impact transportation choices, housing choice and affordability, physical activity, food access, social equity, clean air and water, and more.

Local governments across the country have used several strategies to plan for health. Because comprehensive planning can have long-term impacts on the design of a community, the Planning and Community Health Research Center is conducting a multi-year research study to:

• Identify and determine to what extent municipalities and counties are addressing and integrating public health goals, objectives, and policies in their comprehensive planning efforts.
• Examine and evaluate the clarity, quality and comprehensiveness of public health goals and policies in a sample of the identified plans.
• Conduct case studies to analyze public health goal and policy development, adoption and implementation process.

National Survey

As part of the first phase of this project, APA developed a national, web-based survey to identify draft and adopted comprehensive and sustainability plans that explicitly include public health related goals, objectives, and policies, and inventory the public health topics included in the plans. It also identifies the opportunities and barriers that communities face in the development and adoption of such policies and assesses the current state of planning for public health nationally.

Results of the survey include a list of municipalities and counties from across the country that explicitly address public health in their comprehensive or sustainability plan

Download the survey results report (pdf)

Plan Evaluation

In the second phase of this work, APA selected a group of 22 comprehensive and sustainability plans for a detailed evaluation of their goals, objectives, and policies. The evaluation assessed the extent to which these plans addressed public health through six broad health-related planning topics:

• Active Living
• Emergency Preparedness
• Environmental Exposures
• Food and Nutrition
• Health and Human Services
• Social Cohesion and Mental Health

The report shows which public health topics have been included the most and which topics receive the least attention. It also highlights plan strengths and weaknesses in addressing public health and identifies examples of robust policies from across the group of plans that promote health in their communities.

Download the complete evaluation report (pdf)