[Tagging] Hospital vs. Clinic refinement; Hospital departments

Tom Pfeifer t.pfeifer at computer.org
Fri Nov 27 14:51:21 UTC 2015


I would like to sync the distinctive criterion when to use amenity=hospital or amenity=clinic.

The hospital page says "often but not always providing for longer-term patient stays"
which is a bit fuzzy, while the clinic page clearly says it is a hospital when it
"offers inpatient care (beds for long stays)".

Thus having in-patient beds would be a good criterion, which could be clarified on the hospital page.

Oxford defines hospital as
    "an institution providing medical and surgical treatment and nursing care for sick or injured people."
thus includes the nursing care.

Or are there any clear cases of hospitals that do not have in-patients?

Another clarification that would be necessary is how to tag hospital departments.
The wiki discourages the repetition of amenity=hospital, and recommends to use
building=hospital on buildings.

The buildings can be used for naming departments/stations/wards. I becomes tricky
however when these stations are just in different levels. Maybe some tagging from
the healthcare proposals would help.

In any case, I would not want any amenity=[clinic|doctors|hospital] nodes within
the amenity=hospital campus area (as long as they are operated by the hospital, and
not e.g. a private surgery renting space there).

However I have seen mappers been tempted to tag departments as amenity=clinic,
mainly because some hospital departments like to call themselves "Clinic of ABC therapy".

Thoughts?




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