Designing an assessment tool for Tourism's health impacts in developing countries. Step 2: asking the right question – an example from Peru
Conference Contribution ResearchOnline@JCUAbstract
Background: Although there are many examples of tourism's positive economic, environmental and socio-cultural impacts, the severity of some of its negative implications has attracted the attention of academia and the industry for a long time. The focus on tourism's impact on destination health is more recent and, so far, there is no tool that allows the prediction and monitoring of such impacts. Impact assessment tools in other disciplines have been lacking the crucial inclusion of community-validated indicators. A tourism health impact assessment tool (TOHIAT) must focus on locals' concerns, values and views as it is they who bear the cost of a tourism development at their doorstep. Furthermore, the communities themselves should be able to use it rather than developers with vested interests. Method: This poster presents Step 2 of the design process with Step 1 having been presented at the CISTM11 in 2009. Thirty-five residents from two villages close to the Cordillera Huayhuash trekking circuit in Northern Peru discussed their views on the most important aspects of a healthy community. These aspects are at the same time those that need particular protection from the ramifications of tourism projects. Results: The six most discussed topics were: work, harmony, environment, individual health, education, and family. These concepts will form the basis of the TOHIAT with indicators, corresponding questions, and a visual summary tool allowing quick reference to current assessments results and to changes over time. Conclusion: The collected local concerns were successfully transformed into a manageable number of concepts that form the basis for the TOHIAT. This allows the inclusion of specific indicators as they are of interest to local people rather than outsiders with their respective agendas. The next step will be to focus on the details per indicator, the user-friendliness of the tool, translation into Spanish and testing in the field.
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12th Conference of the International Society of Travel Medicine
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1
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Boston, MA, USA
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International Society of Travel Medicine
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