Meta Data Name: Access to Mental Health Providers
Last Modified: January 9, 2021
Author: Susan Paykin
Access05 at 2 spatial scales. Files can be found here.
- Access05_T
- Access05_Z
Mental health provider data was sourced from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA) through its Treatment Services Locator Tool.
ZIP Code Tract Area (ZCTA) and Census Tract files were sourced from the US Census Bureau, TIGER/Line Shapefiles 2018.
The source SAMSHA mental health provider dataset includes provider name, location (address, city, state, zip, county, latitude and longitude), and contact information (website, phone number).
Data was scraped from the SAMSHA Treatment Locator tool, filtered for mental health providers, cleaned, and then converted to spatial data. Next, we conducted a nearest resource analysis using minimum Euclidean distance as a proxy variable for access. This analysis included calculating centroids for all census tracts and ZCTAs, identifying the nearest mental health provider to each centroid, and calculating the distance in miles.
| Variable | Variable ID in .csv | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Access to mental health providers | minDisMH | Euclidean distance from centroid to nearest mental health provider, in miles |
| ZIP Code Tract Area (ZCTA) | ZCTA | Unique 5-digit assigned ZCTA, usually same as ZIP code |
| Tract GEOID | GEOID | Unique 11-digit GEOID for census tracts (state + county + tract) |
| State | STATEFP | Unique 2-digit ID for states |
| County | COUNTYFP | 3-digit ID for counties |
| Census Tract | TRACTCE | 6-digit ID for census tracts |
Euclidean or straight-line distance is a simple approximation of access or travel from an origin centroid to the nearest hospital. It is not a precise calculation of real travel times or distances.
The final dataset includes US states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, but does not include other territories (Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Palau). ZCTA and tract centroids are not population-weighted.