Tag:healthcare=hospital
 healthcare = hospital
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| Description |
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A hospital providing in-patient medical treatment, used in addition to amenity=hospital. 
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| Group: health |
| Used on these elements |
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| Useful combination |
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| See also |
Status: approved
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| Tools for this tag |
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The tag amenity=hospital is commonly 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. Some mappers also add healthcare=hospital in addition, see here for an explanation.
In contrast, a medical centre with doctors for outpatient care only should be tagged amenity=clinic or New tagging scheme healthcare=clinic or , and an individual doctor's office as amenity=doctors or New tagging scheme healthcare=doctor.
How to map
Draw an area 
around the grounds of the hospital, and add the healthcare=hospital tag to it. If the area is no known, add a node 
at the centre of the hospital. The more common tag amenity=hospital is almost always used as well.
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 healthcare=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.
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.
Specialities of hospitals
The speciality of hospitals can be tagged using the key healthcare:speciality=*.
See also
- beds=* - to state the number of beds.
- emergency=emergency_ward_entrance - to mark the entrance to an emergency ward.
- amenity=hospital - more common tag with same meaning
- amenity=clinic
- amenity=doctors
- healthcare=clinic
Tag history
This tag was introduced as part of a healthcare proposal[1] 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
- Add healthcare=hospital to existing amenity=hospital objects
- Add support in at least prominent data consumers for also healthcare=hospital in addition to supporting amenity=hospital
- 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[2][3], but it also has some notable support[4][5][6].
Attempt to deprecate amenity=hospital was done in 2022 using proposal process.
- ↑ Proposed features/Healthcare
- ↑ tagging mailing list discussion about potential deprecation of healthcare=pharmacy and healthcare=hospital discussing their origin and purpose
- ↑ as of early 2020 JOSM is not including support for healthcare tag
- ↑ support for transition from author of the Vespucci
- ↑ Support in iD, including request to user to "upgrade tags" by adding healthcare=hospital
- ↑ Rejection of dropping support in iD