[talk-au] operator:type to distinguish private/public hospitals | Was: Re: [Tagging] Classifying hospitals (Was: Deprecate healthcare=centre)

Andrew Harvey andrew.harvey4 at gmail.com
Mon Jan 11 23:58:17 UTC 2021


On Tue, 12 Jan 2021 at 10:47, cleary <osm at 97k.com> wrote:

>
> Can be difficult to get right.
>
> It is useful to have a tag to indicate if government/Medicare-funded
> services are available or if one requires private health insurance or a
> credit card to get treatment.  I am not familiar with an appropriate OSM
> tag and it is also difficult as various terms such as "public" and
> "medicare" have different meanings in different countries. Perhaps
> something like public_funded=yes/no/partial
>

The operator:type tag wouldn't say if you can rock up and get free health
care, because you can have a privately operated "public" hospital (I think
Northern Beaches Hospital is an example). So if you're looking to know
where you can go for government covered healthcare then operator:type might
not always be the tag to indicate that.

We might well decide that it's not suitable to try and map that level of
detail in OSM.


>
> The operator:type=* tag does no harm but this can usually be inferred from
> the name of the operator e.g operator=Healthscope, operator=St John of God
> Health Care, operator=Mid North Coast Local Health District etc.
>

Yeah it's usually fairly clear, which makes it easy to add, but makes it
much easier for a machine to understand than the operator string alone.


>
> Public/private/religious etc can be muddled:  St Vincent's Hospital in
> Darlinghurst in Sydney is partly a public hospital and partly private and
> all operated by a religious organisation. It is separated into "St
> Vincent's Hospital" and "St Vincent's Private Hospital" with separate
> reception and accommodation areas but some services are shared by both the
> public and private.   Hawkesbury District Health Service at Windsor NSW
> also has mixture of public/private patients and receives a lot of
> government funding and is operated by a religious organisation. It has only
> the one name and only one main entrance.
>
> Irrespective of the operator and operator:type tags, I think users would
> be assisted most by a tag that clearly indicates the funding source/s,
> particularly whether the facility offers access to government-funded
> services.
>

Yeah, agreed it can be muddled, maybe then a semicolon separated list of
values would be the best we can do.
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