While the development of Health Impact Assessment has been strongly influenced by Environmental Impact Assessment (Joffe and Sutcliffe, 1997), the Healthy Public Policy movement has played an equally important role in shaping its growth. In the introduction to ‘Promoting health through public policy’, Milio wrote:
The health interests of Americans will be better served if the impacts of policies, affecting health important aspects of environments and patterns of living, were assessed (Milio, 1986).
Her notion that the question of how policies would impact on health had to be considered became an implicit part of all subsequent discussion of Healthy Public Policy.