Press Release
Good Housing Leads To Good Health: A toolkit for environmental health practitioners
10 September 2008
The CIEH, in association with the Building Research Establishment (BRE), has launched a toolkit to help practitioners promote the role of good housing to good health.
The toolkit shows how links between homes and health can be made, including where possible, the cost benefit of some specifically linked housing and health issues. Providing evidence of cost benefit is important where resources for improvement or enforcement are lacking.
Speaking on behalf of the BRE toolkit author Viv Mason said:
“There is a growing fear that private sector housing risks being swamped by the government’s agenda for social housing and new build.
“The worry is that this is resulting in an underestimation of the impact poor private housing has on health.
“The toolkit aims to redress this trend by providing methodology and case studies demonstrating how housing is a determinant of public health.”
Good Housing Leads To Good Health: A toolkit for environmental health practitioners provides a ‘cost calculator’ to help practitioners measure interventions, showing the value of private sector housing intervention to health, society and quality of life. It enables users to find a baseline and work out the most effective and cost efficient methods of improving homes.
The toolkit also explains how Local Area Agreements, Health Impact Assessment and other such mechanisms can be used effectively to seek improvements to private sector housing. A number of good practice case studies illustrate how measuring health impacts can be used to show the benefits of intervention.
CIEH Acting Director of Policy Andrew Griffiths said:
“This publication is designed to redress the balance; more interventions in the private sector will undoubtedly improve public health. The guidance will enable environmental health practitioners to demonstrate the value of their work and help preserve vital resources for carrying it out.”
The toolkit and cost calculator can be downloaded from the CIEH website at
http://www.cieh.org/policy/good_housing_good_health.html
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