Proposal:Healthcare=department

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healthcare=department
Proposal status: Proposed (under way)
Proposed by: Janko
Draft started: 2022-12-12
RFC start: 2022-12-13


Proposal

Using healthcare=department for departments of a hospital or a clinic.

This tag would be used on nodes and ways.

Rationale

In big hospitals or clinics with multiple buildings, it is useful to know where different departments are, and which specialties they perform. We already have healthcare:speciality=*, but we can only put it on hospitals, clinics and doctors. We don't have a base tag to put healthcare:speciality=* on for parts of hospitals or clinics. If we add healthcare=department, then we can map big hospitals and clinics in detail.

Tagging

This tag would be put on sub-elements of healthcare=hospital or healthcare=clinic. It doesn't make sense to tag an element outside of a hospital or a clinic area with this tag.

Tags to use in combination:

Examples

Purley War Memorial Hospital, outpatients department
Rockhampton Hospital sign with departments
Map of Aleksandrovska University Hospital

Rendering

Only letters, with the same font and color as hospitals and clinics on general maps. On specialized maps, each department would get an icon depending on the healthcare:speciality=* tag.

Features/Pages affected

In the past, amenity=clinic (and more recently, healthcare=clinic) tags were used for smaller healthcare facilities than hospitals, that don't receive overnight patients. But at one point, they started being used for departments inside a hospital. This makes sense for bigger hospital campuses that indeed have clinics that are fully self sufficient, and sometimes even have a different operator than other parts of the hospital. But for smaller hospitals, healthcare=department should be used instead of healthcare=clinic.

This tag should be added to the table on the page for healthcare=* key

The Healthcare 2.0 proposal has a health_facility:type=department tag, which would now be deprecated.

External discussions

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/tagging-healthcare-speciality-inside-a-hospital/6617/18

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2022-December/066651.html

Comments

Please comment on the discussion page.