[Tagging] Doctors in a joint practice

[Stefan Tauner]

Hi,

apparently we don't have a documented way to tag joint practices, i.e.,
doctor's offices that are shared between multiple physicians.
amenity=doctors mentions that is should be used to such occasions
("These range from a single doctor's office to larger establishments.")
This is missing from the otherwise verbose healthcare tags.
There even has been some "documentation" on the size that has been
removed because it was inadequate:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:amenity%3Ddoctors&diff=prev&oldid=1944262
The (abandoned) healthcare 2.0 proposal mentions them and offers an
intricate solution with health_person:type in a relation...

There is an alternative to tag this in the form of
amenity/healthcare=clinic but the healthcare=clinic's page states "When
tagging, you may wish to consider using amenity=doctors instead if the
practice is small, with perhaps only 1 to 10 staff."
Also, I don't think it would be too wise to introduce another
amenity/healthcare value for that. These establishments are not that
different to doctor's offices with a single physician for the most part
(legal matters are a bit more delicate but we don't map those in too
much detail ;)

However, I really think we should introduce/document a proper way to
tag such joint practices. In Austria there are often <5 doctors that
sometimes only share the receptions. Sometimes they don't have a common
proper name but often they do and then I would like to tag this
explicitly.
What I currently do is to use name=whatever_they_call_their_venture and
add the individual doctors' names comma-separated in the operator tag
(which I usually not use for doctor's offices because it would be equal
to the name tag).
Please post existing examples in the database if you know about them.


Any suggestions how to additionally explicitly tag them as joint
practice? Using the doctors key seems reasonable. That is more or less
unused (some 40 times it is (mis)used to tag specialities; a handful
times it gives a number... probably of doctors?).
We could define a special value for the doctors key (e.g.,
joint_practice) or define it as the number of physicians to be found
there. The former does only make sense if there are other useful values
which I cant think of.

Thus my proposition is to document the doctors value as the number of
physicians in case it is a joint practice (or optionally 1 to indicate
that it is not) and adding their names as comma-separated operator
value.

-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner