[Talk-GB] Q2 2020 Quarterly project GP Surgeries and health sites

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 at 20:40, Peter Neale <nealepb at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> I looked up my 2 "wholesale" pharmacies on the list.  Unfortunately, they are both classed as "community", so will continue to be included in your checking tool.
>
> So... ...should we:
> a.  Continue as we are: Plot them in OSM, tag them as pharmacies, but give them a name that makes it clear that they are not publicly accessible?
> b.  Delete them from OSM, so that consumers don't think they are publicly accessible.  (But they do exist and who knows what consumers will really want to find?)  Then we could ask you to manually delete them from the checking tool (but you probably won't want to keep doing that).
> c.  Do something else?

I certainly wouldn't advocate any inappropriate tagging just to keep
my tool happy! So if we don't think they should be amenity=pharmacy,
then we shouldn't tag them like that. While they may technically be
pharmacies, I would think that amenity=pharmacy is best reserved for
places that are amenities for the general public to use, which would
rule out option (a). As for (b), I wouldn't necessarily delete the
objects completely from OSM: if there's a business presence on the
ground, that could still be tagged. The question then is whether it's
worth tweaking my tool to remove these false positives. You could just
ignore the "missing pharmacy" markers local to you that you know are
wrong. As you say, I would have a manually maintained "ignore" list,
but that would be more effort for me.

What I'd prefer to to is to switch to a better data source for my
pharmacy list. There is a list of NHS-contracted pharmacies at
https://data.gov.uk/dataset/e373eb6a-fffd-48e5-b306-71eb17f97af2/pharmacies
which I think would closer match what we want for amenity=pharmacy,
but unfortunately that list appears to be England only. So I'd need to
find corresponding lists for Wales and Scotland. (NI isn't in the data
I'm currently using. I've found
https://www.psni.org.uk/registration/premises-registration/changes-to-the-premises-register/
but the data is all locked up in PDFs.) Can anyone help out here?

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker