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Health in All Policies: Tools for Practice

Most of what determines how long people live, and how well, is decided by people who don't work in public health. Zoning boards. Transportation departments. School districts. Housing authorities. Budget offices. Health in All Policies — HiAP — is the practice of getting health and equity considered in those rooms, in the decisions those agencies are already making.

It isn't a program you launch or a grant you win. It's a way of working across sectors, and like any practice, it's learnable. Some of it is technical. Much of it is relational, political, and slow.

These tools are for the people doing that work: figuring out where to start, planning something realistic, understanding what good practice looks like, and knowing whether it's working. They're free, they're designed to be used rather than read, and you don't need permission or a budget to pick one up.

New to this? Start with the Screening Guide, then the Strategy Selector. Together they'll take about an hour and will tell you which of the nine HiAP strategies actually fit your situation right now.

Already doing HiAP? Start with the Maturity Assessment to see where your practice stands, then use the Implementation Guide to plan your next move.

Hiring or building a team? Go straight to the Competency Framework.

How the tools fit together

The suite follows the arc of real HiAP work. You don't need all of it, and you don't need it in order — but this is the sequence it was built around.

1. Understand your situation → Screening Guide
2. Choose your strategies → Strategy Selector
3. Plan the work → Project Planning Template
4. Do the work → Implementation Guide
5. See where you stand → Maturity Matrix + Maturity Assessment
6. Find out if it's working → Self-Assessment & Evaluation Guide

Running alongside all six: the Competency Framework, which describes what HiAP practitioners need to know and be able to do.

All of the tools share the same nine strategies, numbered the same way, so what you select in step 2 carries straight through to steps 3, 4, and 6.

The nine strategies

Seven come from Gase, Pennotti and Smith (2013), the foundational U.S. study of how HiAP actually gets done. Two more — centering equity and engaging the community — were added by Suter (2025), reflecting the field's recognition that these aren't optional additions to HiAP but conditions of doing it well.

  1. Develop and structure cross-sector relationships
  2. Incorporate health into decision-making
  3. Enhance workforce capacity
  4. Coordinate funding and investments
  5. Integrate research, evaluation and data
  6. Synchronize communications and messaging
  7. Implement accountability structures
  8. Center equity
  9. Engage the community

HiAP Screening Guide

Before you choose a strategy, understand your context.

Seven questions that shape what's actually possible: how strong your relationships are with other sectors, what resources you have, what kind of decision you're trying to influence, where you are in its timeline, how controversial it is, how open the process is, and what evidence you're holding. The guide walks through each one with examples, so you're answering honestly rather than optimistically.

PDF · about 15 pages

HiAP Strategy Selector 

Answer seven questions. Get your nine strategies ranked by fit.

The Screening Guide in spreadsheet form. Choose your answers from dropdowns and the tool sorts all nine strategies into good fit, partial fit, and poor fit for your specific situation — then points you to an Activities tab listing concrete actions within each one, with the low-resource options starred. If you have an hour and no idea where to begin, start here.

Excel workbook · four tabs

HiAP Project Planning Template 

Turn a selected strategy into a plan someone can act on.

For each strategy you've chosen: objectives, responsibilities, resource allocation, partner commitments, risks, and explicit prompts on equity and community engagement — including who might be inadvertently disadvantaged, and how you'll monitor for that.

PDF · about 24 pages

HiAP Implementation Guide: Nine Strategies 

What each strategy looks like as it matures, and how to move up.

For every strategy, the guide describes four stages of practice and gives specific tactics for moving from one to the next. Rather than telling you what excellent HiAP looks like in the abstract, it names where you probably are and what the next realistic step is. Draws on Suter's case studies of jurisdictions doing this work.

PDF · 15 pages

HiAP Maturity Matrix 

The four stages, on a page.

Emerging, Developing, Maturing, Embedded — across every strategy. Useful for orienting a team quickly, or for showing leadership what "further along" would actually mean.

PDF · 3 pages

HiAP Maturity Self-Assessment

Where does your practice actually stand?

Rate your organization against each strategy and see your stage. Available as a spreadsheet, or as an interactive version you can complete in a browser and get results immediately.

Excel workbook · interactive version also available

HiAP Self-Assessment and Evaluation Guide

Did the work do anything?

Three parts: whether your strategy selection process was rigorous and inclusive, whether the strategies are actually being implemented, and what outcomes have followed across short, medium, and long horizons. Built for use more than once — at the start, midway, and at the end — so you can see change over time. Findings are structured to support reporting to funders, leadership, and partners.

PDF · about 15 pages

HiAP Competency Framework

What HiAP practitioners need to know and be able to do.

Seven practice domains, from governance and systems thinking through evaluation and adaptation, each with foundational and advanced competencies. Written for hiring managers drafting position descriptions, curriculum developers, practitioners planning their own development, and anyone trying to explain this work to an employer. Includes suggested responsibilities by domain and recommended educational background.

PDF

Citing these tools

The tools have different authorship, so cite the one you actually used.

Screening Guide, Strategy Selector, Project Planning Template, Implementation Guide, Maturity Matrix, Maturity Assessment, and Self-Assessment & Evaluation Guide were developed by the SOPHIA HiAP Workgroup. The Screening Guide builds on the original SOPHIA HiAP Screening Workgroup guide of October 2017.

SOPHIA HiAP Workgroup. (2026). [Tool name]. SOPHIA. https://hiasociety.org

The HiAP Competency Framework is an individual work with its own citation:

Whitehead, S. (2026). Health in All Policies in practice: A competency framework for practitioners [White paper]. SSRN.

These tools are free. There's no charge, no license to purchase, but we do recommend becoming a member of SOPHIA. Download what's useful and use it in your work.

Overall HiAP Resources

Foundational research

Evaluation

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