[OSM-talk] [tagging] Medical centres, clinics, doctors and dentists

[Andrew Chadwick (mailing lists)]

Chris Hill wrote:
> Clinic can apply to other medical folks, such as chiropodists and 
> physiotherapists too.

And physical rehabilitation, dementia care, psychiatric counseling... 
the list might be quite a long one.

I'm coming round to the opinion that the different kinds of surgeries 
are all just really kinds of what's being proposed in the rather 
stronger Clinic_(Medical) proposal. But it is probably wise to 
distinguish a dentist from a chiropodist somehow if they might be the 
only ones occupying their respective buildings.

I think we should merge everything into Clinic_(Medical), either before 
it gets accepted or after. Make that mean anything from a huge 
polyclinic covering many disciplines to small doctors' surgeries and 
dental practices.

So how to distinguish one sort of treatment or care from another? 
Perhaps a merged proposal for "small to medium medical facilities" 
should be something like:

   amenity=clinic
   medical=<servicelist>
   emergency=yes|no

where <servicelist> is a semicolon-separated list of values from 
{dentist, doctor, chiropodist, physiotherapy, minor_surgery, ...}.

Opticians in the UK are more like high-street shops than medical 
facilities. It would feel strange to call an optician a clinic too, even 
if the upstairs consulting rooms are all separate and have something of 
the doctor's surgery nature. Hmm.

-- 
Andrew Chadwick