Partnering to Protect You from Peril

Have you ever wondered who keeps an eye on your favorite restaurants to make sure your food is safe? Or removes old tires from vacant lots before they fill with standing water that could attract mosquitos that spread disease? These tasks are among the services provided by local health departments in the United States. These health departments partner with other health departments to share information and coordinate services, which is especially crucial during public health emergencies. In this project, you will explore the 2016 national network of local health departments and use centrality measures and visualization to identify key health departments nationally, regionally, and locally. Which health departments are most connected? Where are there gaps? What are the characteristics of central health departments?

The project uses igraph and tidyverse commands (from readr and dplyr) to import and examine a network made up of an edgelist and an attribute file.

The data in this project was taken from a survey by the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), which you can read about <a href="https://nacchoprofilestudy.org/">here</a>.