The mission of IHS is to raise the physical, mental, social and spiritual health of American Indians and Alaska natives (AI/AN) to the highest level. To be responsive to the second goal of its 2019-2023 strategic plan "to promote excellence and quality through innovation of the Indian health system into an optimally performing organization," the Division of Program Statistics in the Office of Public Health needs to continue its work in discovering new information concerning native peoples throughout the world. International studies of the health of native (or indigenous) peoples provide essential public health insights. Reliable data are required for the development of policy and health services. A landmark 2016 paper in which IHS participated, "Indigenous and tribal peoples' health (The Lancet–Lowitja Institute Global Collaboration): a population study" studied 23 states and 28 indigenous peoples within those states. The methods used for that paper overturned the idea that such groups always fare more poorly than benchmark populations. The coverage of nations or the range of health indicators had been limited in earlier work. Our objective is to expand upon the work already done to describe the health and social status of native or indigenous peoples in new areas of the world by acquiring and compiling more data on these populations.
- Indian Health Service DPS website: https://www.ihs.gov/dps/
- Link to Paper: https://www.lowitja.org.au/page/services/resources/health-policy-and-systems/data/Lancet-Lowitja-Institute-Collaboration
- Documentation: https://andrewjoc.github.io/vsfs-ihs/intro.html
- Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_4R9ut87eemnxWH53VN8QCSyRugit27s?usp=sharing
- People Groups Data: https://www.peoplegroups.org/258.aspx
- People Areas Data: https://go-imb.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/imb::apg-people-group-areas/explore?location=43.783411%2C70.948650%2C4.70
- Fieldmaps.io: https://fieldmaps.io