[Tagging] tag for wards was: Deprecate healthcare=centre

Paul Allen pla16021 at gmail.com
Mon Jan 11 10:44:06 UTC 2021


On Sun, 10 Jan 2021 at 20:15, Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> One other problem with hospital_ward is that there are outpatient
> departments which seem to be called "wards" sometimes in British English,
> and which are called "departments" in the US mostly - though perhaps also
> in the UK.
>

The last time I delved deeply into this (about a year ago) I came to the
conclusion that it was the US that used "ward" to mean department.  In
the UK, the public equates "ward" with "beds."  Most of the
internal UK documentation I dug up also equated "ward" with
"beds" but I found a very small percentage of mentions which
equated "ward" with "department" or "operational unit."  So it may be
that the health service itself uses one meaning of "ward" when
producing public-facing documentation and a different meaning for
internal consumption.


> Perhaps we should rather have healthcare=inpatient_ward to make the
> distinction clear, if that is understandable to non-medical folks?
>

I'm happy with just ward.  Because "outpatient ward" makes no sense.

>
> Paul just mentioned that there might be a "dialysis ward" - but dialysis
> center or wards are normally for outpatients, who do not stay overnight in
> the hospital.
>

Until somebody figures out that having expensive dialysis machines sat doing
nothing overnight is a waste of resources and implements a shift system.

See
http://www.datadictionary.wales.nhs.uk/index.html#!WordDocuments/wardtype.htm
for some more ward types.

As for your options on how to handle this, I see a fundamental difference
between wards and other units: visitors.  I think it preferable that
wards get a different icon (a bed?) to make them stand out on a map,
and tagging that facilitates that.

-- 
Paul
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