Mapping Health Distributions in Florida using Public State Data
Abstract
In this project, I use publicly-available Florida data to map distributions of both health resources and environments by county. The ggplot2 R package is utilized for the construction of these maps and the data is published by the Florida Department of Health. The first group of maps deals with the availability of a variety of health resources, including physician numbers and hospital beds per county. The second group of maps details the distribution of what I label health environments. These categories include factors that could prove detrimental to one’s ability to live a healthy, active life (such as vacant housing and heat exposure). Broadly speaking, these maps inform our understanding of health policy and politics disparities across Florida’s counties and the hidden costs relevant to their existence. This project serves as a starting point for using state sources to clean data, constructing maps with different scales, and interpreting their meaning with relevant background information.
Maps of Health Resource Distribution in Florida
