GRANIT Metadata for State and Local Public Health Departments

Title: State and Local Public Health Departments
Time Period of Content: 11/30/2009 - 12/07/2009 Initial Publication Date: 02/19/2010
Originator: TechniGraphics, Inc.
Abstract:
State and Local Public Health Departments 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.
Theme Keywords: Public health administration., County health services, Community health services--Administration., structure, health
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