Tag:amenity=hospital

amenity = hospital
Description
A hospital providing in-patient medical treatment
Rendering in openstreetmap-carto
Group: Amenities
Used on these elements
Useful combination
name=* emergency=* operator=* operator:type=* website=* phone=* beds=*
See also
amenity=clinic amenity=doctors amenity=social_facility healthcare=hospital
Status: de facto
Tools for this tag
taginfo · CH · CZ · FR · GB · HU · IE · IN · JP · PL overpass-turbo
Wikidata
Q16917

amenity=hospital is used for hospitals, i.e. institutions for health care providing treatment by specialised staff and equipment, and typically providing nursing care for longer-term patient stays.

In contrast, a medical centre with doctors for outpatient care only should be tagged amenity=clinic, and an individual doctor's office as amenity=doctors.

How to map

Draw an area around the grounds of the hospital, and add the amenity=hospital tag to it. If the area is not known, add a node at the centre of the hospital.

You add the name using the key name=*.

If you know whether or not the hospital in question is equipped to deal with emergencies - this is called A&E (accidents and emergencies) in the UK and ER (emergency room) in the US - then you can add emergency=* with a value of "yes" or "no" and, if applicable, a node at the emergency ward entrance with emergency=emergency_ward_entrance.

You may see the amenity=hospital tag on an area alongside a building=yes (or building=hospital tag), where there is a single building outline for the hospital, however the normal approach is draw an area enveloping the hospital grounds and one or more areas with building tags inside this area. It's quite common to have a large hospital campus with multiple buildings. Note that the buildings should not carry the amenity=hospital tag. One feature, one OSM element. One hospital, one area tagged amenity=hospital. This is in line with recommendations for other types of institution such as schools and universities.

Building entrances can be mapped with a node on the building outline, with the tag entrance=yes. Likewise an entrance to the grounds of the hospital might be mapped as a node with barrier=*. This node would also be part of a footway or service road from the main road network so that it is possible to route to the entrance of the hospital.

Tags to use in combination

• emergency=yes/no - whether the hospital offers emergency services
• operator=* - name of the organisation which operates the hospital
• operator:type=* - specifies if the operator is a community, religious, private, or government organisation
• beds=* - the total number of inpatient hospital beds
• Address
• website=*
• phone=*

Example rendering

Loading map...

{"tileLayer":"//{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png","attribution":"\u0026copy; \u003Ca href=\"http://osm.org/copyright\"\u003EOpenStreetMap\u003C/a\u003E contributors","center":{"lat":51.4534,"lon":-0.0172},"zoom":"16"}

Examples

First:

amenity=hospital

name=Hospital for Tropical Diseases

emergency=no

Second:

amenity=hospital

name=Royal London Hospital

emergency=yes

Mapping internal hospital structure

Hospitals may have complex structure that may be mappable. Hospital may be split into wards/clinics/departments/facilities/units/centers each limited to specific area. Sadly there is currently no good way to tag such features. University mapping suffers from a related problem.

Each part may have its own name, area, opening hours etc. In case of any bigger hospital it is also useful to tag them precisely to allow better navigation.

Some parts of such structure issues have good existing solutions:

• emergency=emergency_ward_entrance - to mark the entrance to an emergency ward.
• amenity=doctors - individual doctor's office

amenity=clinic is defined differently but is commonly used for parts of a hospital (wards/clinics/departments), especially in places where name of hospital segment is using word similar to "clinic".

amenity=hospital is sometimes used to mark parts of a hospital, this is also an incorrect tagging but sometimes without a viable alternative.

Relation to healthcare=hospital tag

The tag healthcare=hospital is an exact duplicate and it is sometimes also added.

healthcare=hospital was introduced as part of a healthcare proposal and intentionally duplicates amenity=hospital. It is used by some with intention of replacing and deprecating amenity=hospital in the future. The plan is to

1. Add healthcare=hospital to existing amenity=hospital objects
2. Add support in at least prominent data consumers for also healthcare=hospital in addition to supporting amenity=hospital
3. Remove support for amenity=hospital in data consumers and remove this tag from hospitals

There is opposition to this potential deprecation of widely used tag amenity=hospital, but it also has some notable support.

See also

• beds=* - to state the number of beds.
• emergency=emergency_ward_entrance - to mark the entrance to an emergency ward.
• amenity=clinic
• amenity=doctors
• healthcare=hospital

References

Related terms: ‹ ward › ‹ institution › ‹ hospital ›