By Colette HochsteinA Community Health Maps (CHM) online tutorial is now available. It is a free, self-paced online course from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which provides guidance on using low cost mapping tools to collect, analyze, and visualize mapping data.Community Health Maps seeks to empower communities and individuals by helping them collect and map health-related data. The CHM tutorial helps users build a plan to collect data, create forms to capture data points, and use mobile devices to collect data. The CHM tutorial can also aid in creating online and printable maps that can be customized to meet the needs of specific populations and stakeholders.The tutorial covers how to create a basic workflow for collecting and mapping field data via step-by-step instructions on how to (1) develop a data collection form, (2) collect field data according to the data collection plan, (3) create online dynamic maps of the data collected, and (4) create static offline publishable maps of field data using desktop software.As a bonus, this course provides continuing education credit (CE), including through the Medical Library Association (MLA, http://www.medlib-ed.org/products/1847/community-health-maps), and/or a certificate of completion. For continuing education credits and/or a certificate of completion, please enroll in the course on the free Learning Management System (LMS).
If you are new to Community Health Maps, and are not sure how this mapping workflow can benefit you and your organization, you can search this blog for case studies. In particular you may want to look at the selected case studies linked to below. Read about how students and professionals have used Community Health Maps:
- Mapping South Florida's King Tides
- GIS as an Educational Tool at MUSC
- Exploring Accessibility and Sustainability at the University of Maryland School of Public Health
- Association for Prevention and Teaching Research Conference (APTR)