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, we 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 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 here.
Clone this repository and open the Jupyter notebook file (*.ipynb) in a Jupyter environment with R kernel support. Make sure to install the required packages such as tidyverse. You can do this by running the following commands in a code cell within the notebook:
install.packages("tidyverse")Once the packages are installed, run the code cells in the notebook to generate the plots and analyses.
If you don't have a Jupyter environment set up, you can install Jupyter Notebook and the R kernel using the following steps:
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Install Jupyter Notebook by following the instructions on the official Jupyter website.
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Install the R kernel for Jupyter Notebook by running the following commands in your R console:
install.packages("IRkernel")
IRkernel::installspec()After completing the installation, launch Jupyter Notebook, navigate to the folder containing the notebook file, and open it to begin running the analysis.
- Ebola, hurricanes, and forest fires, oh my: Import the network ties and the characteristics of each health department in the network.
- Cleaning up the network object: Check the network object for loops and multiple ties between health departments.
- Getting to know the network: Get to know your network via a few standard network descriptive statistics.
- Connections facilitating coordination nationwide: Identify the key central health departments that share information and coordinate national emergency preparedness and response.
- Connections for regional coordination: Examine the network of local health departments across Texas and Louisiana.
- Which health departments are central in Texas and Louisiana?: Find the health departments in each state that are most well connected and are bridging others.
- Visualizing the central health departments: Examine the central nodes using network plots.
- What about state-level networks during emergencies?: Examine the network of California health departments.
- Are central health departments urban?: Visualize cali.net with nodes sized by degree centrality and node color representing rurality, population, and fte.
- Which health departments have high betweenness?: Visualize cali.net with node color representing different network characteristics and node size representing betweenness.