Governmental public health departments are responsible for creating and maintaining conditions that keep people healthy. A local health department may be locally governed, part of a region or district, be an office or an administrative unit of the state health department, or a hybrid of these. Furthermore, each community has a unique "public health system" comprising individuals and public and private entities that are engaged in activities that affect the public's health.
(Excerpted from the Operational Definition of a functional local health department, National Association of County and City Health Officials, November 2005)
Please reference <http://www.naccho.org/topics/infrastructure/accreditation/upload/OperationalDefinitionBrochure-2.pdf> for more information.
Facilities involved in direct patient care are intended to be excluded from this dataset; however, some of the entities represented in this dataset serve as both administrative and clinical locations.
This dataset only includes the headquarters of Public Health Departments, not their satellite offices.
Some health departments encompass multiple counties; therefore, not every county will be represented by an individual record. Also, some areas will appear to have over representation depending on the structure of the health departments in that particular region.
Visiting nurses are represented in this dataset if they are contracted through the local government to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of the local health organization.
Effort was made by TechniGraphics to verify whether or not each health department tracks statistics on communicable diseases.
Records with "-DOD" appended to the end of the [NAME] value are located on a military base, as defined by the Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure (DISDI) military installations and military range boundaries.
"#" and "*" characters were automatically removed from standard fields populated by TechniGraphics. Double spaces were replaced by single spaces in these same fields.
Text fields in this dataset have been set to all upper case to facilitate consistent database engine search results.
All diacritics (e.g., the German umlaut or the Spanish tilde) have been replaced with their closest equivalent English character to facilitate use with database systems that may not support diacritics.
The currentness of this dataset is indicated by the [CONTDATE] field. Based on this field, the oldest record dates from 11/30/2009 and the newest record dates from 12/07/2009.
Use Cases: Use cases describe how the data may be used and help to define and clarify requirements.
1. A resource for preparing, mitigating, responding to and recovering from an emergency.
2. A resource for outside responders to locate and aid in catastrophe response or disaster.
3. A resource for situational awareness planning and response for Federal Government events.
TGS PinPoint® v.1.11
Metadata written using TKME by Peter N. Schweitzer (U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA 22092) version 2.9.17 <http://geology.usgs.gov/tools/metadata/>
Metadata tested for compliance to FGDC-STD-001-1998 and converted to HTML using MP version 2.8.25 by Peter N. Schweitzer (U.S. Geological Survey) <http://geology.usgs.gov/tools/metadata/>
ID Check: The [ID] field is not blank and each of its values is unique.
Coordinate Check: Coordinates are not null or zero and the [X] and [Y] fields match the shape.
Basic Address Check: Physical addresses were verified to be non blank and to not be a "PO Box", "General Delivery", "Highway Contract", or "Rural Route" address.
Highway Address without Type Check: Physical addresses containing the word "Highway" or "Route" were verified to also contain a type designator such as "State", "US", or "County", if one actually exists for the highway or route. These type designators are often missing from addresses, leading to confusion if more than one "Highway" of the given number exists in an area.
Basic Name Check: Entity name is not blank, is not the same as entity city, and has a minimum of two (2) characters. Name does not contain punctuation characters that can interfere with database operations, such as " (quote) and * (asterisk).
City Check: Entity's [CITY] field is not blank, and entity is located within 25 miles of its tabular city as found in the NAVTEQ Named Places reference file.
State Check: The entity is located within its tabular state.
County Check: The entity is located within its tabular county.
FIPS Check: The tabular FIPS Code matches the entity's tabular county and tabular state.
County in Name vs. Geographic Location Check: If an entity's [NAME] field contains the word "county" or "co", the same county value should also be in the entity's [COUNTY] field.
Basic Phone Check: All phone numbers (including the area code) are ten (10) numeric digits. Alphabetic characters have been converted to the corresponding numeric digit.
NPA_NXX Check: Area codes (sometimes called "Number Planning Areas", or NPA's) and central office codes (sometimes known as exchanges, or NXX's) were validated against data from the North American Number Planning Administration (NANPA). In some cases, NPA-NXX combinations did not show up in the NANPA data but were verified to work.
Area Code Distance Check: The entity's area code (NPA) is valid, and the entity is not more than 25 miles from its area code boundary, as defined by data from the North American Number Planning Administration (NANPA), unless TechniGraphics has previously verified that the phone number rings to a headquarters location or otherwise does not ring to the entity's location.
Zip Code Check: The entity's zip code is five (5) or nine (9) numeric digits, is listed in the postal database, is in the same state as indicated by the entity's [STATE] value, and is not a PO Box only zip code.
Zip City Check: The entity's zip code and its city were verified to match according to the USPS Address Information System (AIS).
Zip Code Distance Check: The entity is located within 25 miles of its zip code boundary, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau's 1999 Zip Code file.
NAICS Code Check: The NAICS field is not blank, the NAICS Code is one of the accepted codes for this layer, the NAICS Description is an acceptable Index Entry for the NAICS Code, and certain key words in the entity name do not conflict with the NAICS Code.
Collocation Check: Entities with different addresses must not share the exact same geospatial location.
Geographic Spell Check: Words that appear in the entity name were checked against a standard English word list (and Spanish word list for entities in Puerto Rico). Words not appearing in these standard word lists were then checked against names appearing in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) of geographic features that are located within 25 miles of the entity. Proper names were manually reviewed for correct spelling.
Supplied Coordinates Distance Check: Entity is located within 3 miles of coordinates supplied by the original source.
This dataset only includes the headquarters of Public Health Departments, not their satellite offices.
Some health departments encompass multiple counties; therefore, not every county will be represented by an individual record. Also, some areas will appear to have over representation depending on the structure of the health departments in that particular region.
Visiting nurses are represented in this dataset if they are contracted through the local government to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of the local health organization.
TechniGraphics was not tasked with ensuring the completeness of this layer.
Records with "-DOD" appended to the end of the [NAME] value are located on a military base, as defined by the Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure (DISDI) military installations and military range boundaries.
2) If TechniGraphics was unable to make contact with authoritative sources, verification was made through alternate references.
3) All text fields were set to all upper case.
4) Leading and trailing spaces were trimmed from all text fields.
5) Non printable and diacritic characters were removed from all text fields.
Please reference <http://www.naccho.org/topics/infrastructure/accreditation/upload/OperationalDefinitionBrochure-2.pdf> for more information.
Sometimes an entity may report a city that is not accepted by the USPS, and although TechniGraphics has tried to replace those cities with an acceptable alternative, some of them may remain in this dataset.
Entities that operate at the local or tribal level of government are classified under this description.
Entities that operate at the state or other level of government are classified under this description.
A permanent, unique number assigned to a geographic feature for the sole purpose of uniquely identifying that feature as a record in any information system database, dataset, file, or document and for distinguishing it from all other feature records so identified. The number is assigned sequentially (highest existing number plus one) to new records as they are created in the Geographic Names Information System. The number, by design, carries no information or association to the content of the feature record and therefore is not subject to change as attribute values change. Once assigned to a feature, the number is never changed or withdrawn, and never reassigned. The Feature ID can be applied in conjunction with system-unique record identifiers in any database or system, thus providing a national standard common reference identifier across multiple datasets. The Feature ID is stored in the GNIS database as an integer with a maximum of ten digits.
The level of government at which the entity operates.
Total number of staff at the health department.
Indicates whether or not the entity has specialized equipment.
Indicates whether or not the entity tracks statistics on communicable diseases.