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

Mark Williams mark.666 at blueyonder.co.uk
Sat Jun 7 08:28:52 BST 2008


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Andrew Chadwick (mailing lists) wrote:
> 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.
> 

The original amenity = doctor got 7 yes & 0 no votes (apart from the
routine one). I think it was liked, but not exciting anyone. I still
think it makes sense, and doesn't exclude =dentist, =osteopath,
=optician etc, and fits consistently with all other access, opening
time, & other relevant tags.

The newer clinic proposal seems relatively clumsy & not user-friendly
with a proliferation of odd but vaguely similar tags, not to mention
icons; if you have 6 green-cross based icons, most people won't recall
which meant what after a week & you might as well just have one.

I don't have a problem with an amenity=clinic tag to cover some of
Para.2 above with their own set of tags; but most countries have some
form of local doctor & other specific amenities.

Mark
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