DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34990.v1
title: National Profile of Local Health Departments, 2013
title: Version 1

description: Conducted by the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), the purpose of this survey of local health departments (LHDs) was to advance and support the development of a database for LHDs to describe and understand their structure, function, and capacities. A core set of questions was submitted to every LHD. In addition, some LHDs received one of two randomly assigned modules of supplemental questions. The core questions covered governance, funding, workforce (staffing levels, occupations employed, top executive education and licensure), LHD activities, community health assessment and health improvement planning, use of the Community Guide of Preventive Services, and policy-making and advocacy. The surveyed LHD activities include immunization, screening for diseases and conditions, treatment for communicable diseases, maternal and child health, epidemiology and surveillance activities, population-based primary prevention activities, and regulation, inspection and/or licensing activities. Topics covered by Module 1 included quality improvement, accreditation through the Public Health Accreditation Board, sharing of resources across LHDs, human resources issues, partnerships and collaboration with other organizations in the community, practice-based research, health impact assessments, use of the County Health Rankings reports, and collaboration with public health institutes. Module 2 examined emergency preparedness, public health informatics, access to health care services, and health disparities.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Response Rates: Overall, the study had a response rate of 79 percent: 2,000 of 2,532 LHDs.
description: Datasets: DS0: Study-Level Files DS1: Public-Use Version of the Data DS2: Restricted-Use Version of the Data
description: National Profile of Local Health Departments Series
description: web-based survey
description: The survey universe comprises 2,532 of the approximately 2,800 agencies in the United States that met NACHHO's definition of a LHD: an administrative or service unit of local or state government, concerned with health, and carrying some responsibility for the health of a jurisdiction smaller than the state. Hawaii and Rhode Island were excluded because their state health departments operate on behalf of local public health and have no sub-state units.
description: The survey attempted to interview all of the LHDs in the survey universe. Stratified random sampling was used to select LHDs that were assigned one of the two modules of supplementary questions. Altogether, 1,288 LHDs received the core questions only, 624 the core questions plus Module 1, and 620 the core questions plus Module 2.