[Tagging] free_standing_emergency_department, amenity or clinic ?

[Nita Rae Sanders]

On 4/30/19, Jmapb <jmapb at gmx.com> wrote:
> On 4/29/2019 4:47 PM, Nita Rae Sanders wrote:
>> This concerns the best way to tag a hospital/healthcare facility that
>> is known as a 'free standing emergency department. It is also called
>> an offsite emergency department.
>>
>> ...
>>
>> Does this situation dictate a new high-level attribute value (e.g.
>> amenity=free_standing_emergency_department) or is it better addressed
>> via …
>> amenity=clinic, healthcare=clinic,
>> clinic=freestanding_emergency_department tag ?
>
> I've mapped one of these:
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/6372786026
>
> Unfortunately it doesn't have "Emergency" in its name, but that's what
> it is -- a standalone emergency department owned and operated by NYU
> Langone. You can walk in, but it seems to mostly be ambulance traffic. I
> went for healthcare=centre+healthcare:speciality=emergency, but I'm not
> convinced that's perfect.
>
> It's got a very different feel from an "Urgent Care" center, which I'd
> tag as healthcare=clinic. It feels like a hospital department that
> happens to be offsite.

That's exactly what it is. They exist for all the following reasons:

o Cheaper than building a whole new hospital (just to get the ER)
o Allow for better utilization of the inpatient care capacity at the
central facility
o Redundancy of the ER department
o Outreach to areas otherwise poorly served
o Reduction of time for ambulance pickup to ER arrival (and to patient
stabilization)
o Functionally equivalent to an onsite ER department, with the
exception of Trauma handling

There are now more off-site ER departments in Florida, than on-site ER
departments.