[Talk-GB] NHS England open data - hospitals

[Russ Garrett]

Hello!

I've been doing a little bit of investigatory work into the open data
which NHS England makes available (under OGL), with some view of
looking at the feasibility of an import:
https://www.nhs.uk/about-us/nhs-website-datasets/

I'm looking first at using this data to improve the mapping of
hospitals in England which are marked as "NHS Sector" in the hospitals
data file. This data should allow us to spot hospitals which are not
mapped, and improve the ones which are with website, phone number,
operator, and address data.

You can see the map of running osm_conflate against this data here
(this shows the changes which it would make, with green pins being
additions and blue pins being modifications):
https://render.githubusercontent.com/view/geojson?url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/russss/nhs_osm_conflate/main/diffs/osm_uk_hospitals_conflated.json

My initial impression here is that this is extremely good at spotting
unmapped local hospitals, of which there are quite a few (some of
which I have already fixed manually). It's less accurate at correctly
identifying existing hospitals in urban situations where there might
be several on the same campus.

We may be able to fix this by pre-tagging these existing hospitals
with the NHS organisation ID before running an import (we'll need a
ref tag for this), we may need to manually check each change, or we
can simply use this data to guide manual tagging.

I'll continue looking into this, but I thought people might want to
take a look at the results so far.

Cheers,

-- 
Russ Garrett
russ at garrett.co.uk