While working on a US mapping project, I noticed that the NHS key is used for UK hospitals in the National Health Service.
What should be done in a case like this? If the wiki contradicts how people use the tag, which is correct?
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It looks like it is being used on Doctors surgeries and Dentists to indicate that that place accepts NHS patients (and therefore doesn’t charge) in contrast to only taking private fee paying patients.
nhs_patients=yes may be a better tag.
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The tag has only been used 20 times or so in this way, and mostly by one user. We could just ask them if they’re happy with us changing it to nhs_patients=yes?
I’ve written a few messages to people who used the tag, with a link to this discussion.
There isn’t a tool where you can type a (rare) tag and it gives you the list of all the users who have used it, is there?
Could use network=National Health Service . Reserving brand= for the company itself, depending how operator= should be used, eg =Priory Medical Group from the usage.
You should probably add the other kind of usage to the wiki page for documentation
Generally speaking, the wiki doesn’t “contract” anything, it is supposed to document how a tag is used.
However it makes no sense, if a tag is very widely used for one thing to start using it in a few cases for something else, so @RobJN’s and @osmuser63783’s suggestion makes perfect sense here.
Edit: Ha! Apparently “contracts” was a typo. Hopefully this answer still makes sense 
Overpass can quite easily find all uses of a current tag in an area. You could probably write something to extract a list of users from that, but as there are only 32 I’d just go through the list
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General practitioners and dentists usually operate as partnerships(*) who accept NHS patients (for GPs who subcontract to the NHS they pretty much have to accept onto their books anyone in their designated catchment area). In those specific instances a tag such as NHS_patients=yes would be appropriate.
However the situation is different for hospitals. The majority of them are funded and run by the NHS. A few might have a private wing or offer private treatments. For these NHS is the appropriate tag. There are some private hospitals around and NHS would be inappropriate for them unless they are co-sited within the grounds of a larger NHS facility but offer a limited range of service — typically quick and dirty operations. Even with the presence of a private hospital the site remains NHS.
(*) There are some GP practices that have been taken over by avaricious companies — predominately subsiduaries of large US health care comapnies — but they still accept NHS patients.
Is it?
(Apparently I have to make this post more than ten characters long to be able to send it. Ridiculous.)
Isn’t that just operator=NHS? (573 uses)
Hi, as an ex pharmacist, I would be happiest if NHS_anything=yes is not used. It does not define how the Doctor/pharmacy/dentist/hospital is related to the NHS (owned, contracted, operated by or provides a service to etc) so it is misleading.
I would say operator=… and/or owner=… should be the Local NHS Trust or charity name , the company name or lead practitioner as appropriate. Just “NHS” is too vague.
access=yes or access:conditional= (if it’s not obvious) and payment=public_funded or payment=private might be a clear addition in a few cases. (service=private clashes with highways)
I think a better way to handle this is to apply the the agency’s anagram to the appropriate tag. This would indicate each service that the office had an existing contract to work with the agency. For payments, payment=NHS or payment=CMS(Medicad in US) would show that the particular agency have agreements with office cover or offset patients bills. This would make it easy to indicate which agencies had agreements with a doctor allowing them to provide care to different patients at multiple governmental levels.