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Opioid Clinic Access
Determine underserved areas in Oakland County, Michigan
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This Story Map covers one possible way to visualize and understand underserved areas with regards to access to drug treatment facilities.
It incorporates the methodology that Jim Herries and the policy team suggest: “flipping” the story by using component layers to “score” each Census block or parcel in a city based on 1) walkable access and 2) drivable access to facilities.
This is a great example of a policy map. Steven Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis and former deputy mayor of New York City, summarizes:
"A policy map is a map where the opportunity to intervene is clear."
So let's dive in to the map and clearly show opportunities for intervention.
We'll start by adding the clinics- this is the initial focus of the map so we'll make the symbols a bright color like this yellow.
Then we provide a 10 minute walk time service area and make it green to show that this is something beneficial to the community.
The 10 minute drive time area is shown in blue, another color indicating something positive (though a slightly lower cognitive positivity to green).
Now here comes the fun part!
Let's add block centroids and symbolize the points based on total population...
Greater populations are represented with larger red symbols. We are initially concerned with highly populated areas outside of the service areas (e.g., the dark gray area in the southwest portion of this map).
But what if we wanted to visualize other demographic variables? For example, households without vehicles and households below the poverty line?
With a quick enrichment, we can symbolize these block centroids with at-risk demographics.
This map shows the number of households without vehicles.
The block highlighted is one area of possible concern because, although located within the 10-minute drive time area, many of the households here do not have a vehicle to get to a clinic.
This map highlights the number of households living below the poverty line.
Blocks with households living below the poverty line seem to be clustered around clinics.
However, the block highlighted here may be underserved because it is relatively far from a clinic and has a large number of households living below the poverty line.
With the Enrich tool, we can select from thousands of demographic attributes and identify underserved areas.
If the initiative requires a stand-alone, embedable app, I'd recommend the Map Journal or Map Series because it is visually pleasing, provides a guided narrative, and has the layer on/off functionality.
Here's an example of what this could look like in a Map Journal Story Map: