[OSM-talk] [tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Residential home

[Mike Harris]

Hi Greg

Thanks for useful input - agree that US 'assisted living' = UK 'sheltered
accommodation'. Medical care (or at least nursing care) is indeed the key
difference. Although a Brit I have lived twice in the USA (as well as
briefly in Germany) so am reasonably au fait with the THREE ((;>) totally
different languages! I even own a British-American American-British
bilingual dictionary! But I still make mistakes - like asking an American
lady business visitor once (when checking her into a hotel) when she would
like to be knocked up in the morning ... Also did media training in the US
(as a conversion course from doing PR in the UK) - and that was a real
eye-opener!

Cheers!

-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Troxel [mailto:gdt at ir.bbn.com] 
Sent: 06 August 2009 13:01
To: Mike Harris
Cc: 'David Earl'; 'Birgit Huesken'; talk at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] [tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Residential home


"Mike Harris" <mikh43 at googlemail.com> writes:

> David's summary is imho a good one. There are subtle but not 
> hard-and-fast distinctions between 'sheltered accommodation' for those 
> who can manage in their own place but need a warden around (and 
> perhaps a community room or a public kitchen) and 'nursing home' for 
> those in need of greater care, including nursing care. The normal 
> progression is from 'sheltered accommodation' to 'nursing home' (to 
> cemetery!). David and Birgit are

FWIW in the US we use "assisted living" for what I think you mean by
"sheltered accomodation", and also use "nursing home".  The difference is
that the help in assisted living is not 'medical care'.  (I'm not trying to
argue with the name - but I often find wiki pages that say things that might
look like

  residential=sheltered_accomodation :  Use this for a sheltered
accomodation.

to be not all that useful, since people either know what the words mean or
they don't.  A lot of UK terms aren't obvious to us Yanks, and I'm sure it's
the other way around.

> correct to distinguish 'shelter' - which in British English - is quite 
> different from 'sheltered accommodation' and is indeed a more 
> temporary arrangement for people, e.g. homeless, victims of domestic 
> violence etc. who need a temporary place to go while sorting out their 
> lives. I.e. people entering 'sheltered accommodation' usually leave it 
> only for a 'nursing home' (or the grave) while most people entering a 
> 'shelter' will sooner or later resume a more normal lifestyle.

We use 'shelter' in the same sense, more or less.