https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:department, which says can be used for either Universities or Department Stores
the page has a disclaimer stating that it is used with different meaning and therefore discouraged. Is this judgement shared here by the others? Isn’t the meaning “a department” (the same meaning) and what changes is the context? I don’t see a need for this warning.
Cheers Martin
The situation of university units is very complicated and non-uniform. The terminology of school, faculty, department, programme, centre, institute, etc can all exist in different order.
Hospitals are simpler. It could be solved alone first. Although there may still be the case for university teaching or research hospital being integrated with the university organizational structure, meaning they can be checked for incompatibility.
universities with a human medicine faculty will typically operate a hospital (at least in some countries) and might have the same kind of complexity for their subdivisions as other parts of universities.
My point was that hospital mapping is pretty poorly developed (this is the major university hospital in a cit which has a really experienced OSM community & the university use OSM for internal maps). Some of this discussion seems trying to run before we can walk. I think we should take a few reasonably mapped hospitals which people know, and can visit, and work up the features of those before deciding on keys in a fairly arbitrary way.
I’d disagree: hospitals I know all show a similar degree of complexity. Also some hospitals are parts of hospital systems which adds an extra degree of complexity (CHRU de Brest, Nottingham University Hospitals Trust, etc.; the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UMPC) went through an event horizon and is now a corporate healthcare behemoth) as services and specialties get moved around locations as well.
I have delved a bit into the Croatian public healthcare system, and I found we have departments within departments within departments. It’s probably similarly complex in most healthcare systems.
I think our best bet is to create a very general element like our healthcare=department, or a new one if department is a loaded term in British English. Then we use it as the base tag for all subdivisions of hospitals and clinics. We can use tags like operator=, department= and similar tags to create relations and hierarchy between departments. I think that’s the only way to capture all the possible complexities. If we start developing a more complex base system of tags, it will be impossible to carry that into all the public health systems around the world.
I’m going to start a new thread called “Mapping Hospitals”. I start with examples from three I know reasonably well. If other contributors can suggest other hospitals I think we can achieve two things:
Just as a teaser, for one of the hospitals pretty much the most important thing is knowing which entrance to use: they’re mapped, but not shown on any renderer.
I had written something similar that hospitals can be complex too, the citation is from a text I had cited myself
Have you started it? If so, it would be good to mention it in this thread
Sorry no, not yet. I’ve got massively distracted by wikidata species tags.
Have you tried health_facility:type=department, yet? 
This can also be used via a type=health-relation if needed.
This tag exists since 2011, but is only used a few times, maybe it is not needed or the proposal is still too complicated. Many things from it were added to the broken healthcare=*-schema over the years.
Some people marked it as such, it was, may be, not understood by them, but works and can be used.
I saw it later and marked it as inactive. Do don’t want to do any voting about it, as if some people may find it useful, then they should use it.
Some tags that it proposes have been marked as deprecated by other mappers then me on some wiki pages, as tags such as healthcare=dentist are so much better then amenity=dentist.
At least for my try to write a better proposal, the evolution has failed until now.
This is normal (health_facility:type=department can be used on other departments), you even may have changes between the medical system within one hospital (maybe in the same building) or some departments are called a clinic (this is why I used the kind of work organisation), where others not.
If you think, that the naming of the used tags could be better: it was not known to me, that there is common use of keys with more than one colon inside, at this time, as also the HOT people don’t used them, who already had invented health_facility:type=* before, and as parts of their work could be reused, I named the other main-keys of my proposal after it. But we also have things such as power=tower.
I tagged one hospital with departments, and it looks like this:
After mapping I feel it’s pretty easy to start mapping a hospital like this, and it adds a lot of very useful data. You learn that a hospital has a department that deals with, for example, gastroenterology, and you see where that department is. The tag healthcare=department might change, but the healthcare:speciality=* together with level=*, phone=* and others are the true important tags there.