UK Quarterly Project 2025 Q2: Healthcare

Communities United Kingdom
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Hello!
The Q2 project is on Healthcare. I’ve created wiki page here. Please add to it as you can.

We’ve not had a healthcare specific quarterly project since 2020, although we have had Defibrillators more recently. What do you think would be good metrics (if any) for this?

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If you’re wanting to get involved in this Quarterly Project, a good place to start might be to have a look at your local area in my comparison tool at https://osm.mathmos.net/healthcare/progress/.

Click through to your postcode area and zoom in the map. The overlay features are as follows:

  • Dark Green Blobs/Lines - matches between OSM and an official register entry based on a ref value added in OSM.
  • Light Green Blobs/Lines - matches between OSM and official register entry based on location. You might like to check if the match is correct. (If not, maybe mapping and adding the ref to the right object might fix things.)
  • Blue Circles - Entries in an official register with no matching OSM object. You might like to see if the facility is already mapped but needs its tags improving so the tool picks it up. If not, perhaps it could be mapped after a survey?
  • Red Circles - OSM objects that aren’t matched to an official register entry. Perhaps the object has been mis-tagged, or perhaps its since closed. A ground survey might help. (It might also be that it’s correctly mapped and tagged, but this type of facility doesn’t have an entry in the registers that I’ve used.)
  • Yellow Circles - Unmatched OSM objects where we wouldn’t necessarily expect a match. These can be ignored.

Further details about the tool can be found at https://osm.mathmos.net/healthcare/ If you have any queries about the tool or want to report any discrepancies, there’s another thread: New Healthcare Comparison Tool .

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Here’s something else people might like to try on this project. This Overpass Turbo query finds objects tagged with amenity=social_facility that don’t have a social_facility=* sub-tag. There’s currently 819 objects found. Quite a few of these will probably be care homes of one sort of another.

Can you help by reviewing some of these objects and adding appropriate social_facility=* subtags? See Key:social_facility - OpenStreetMap Wiki for the common values. You might be able to find out what the object is from its name or other existing tagging, by finding an official website, or from one of the Healthcare sources in my tool*.

(* All the sources in my tool except the ‘Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority’ in Northern Ireland have their data available under the OGL, and so can be used in OSM. But I’d stay clear of using the addresses, as there’s an exemption for 3rd Party Rights, and they might be contaminated by OS / Royal Mail IP.)

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@Robert_Whittaker how frequently/when does your tool update, so I can see if it’s linked some places that I edited?

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Are there any tags for private/commercial clinics that are relevant to use in the UK?

I’ve particularly found places in shopping centres like “Thérapie Clinic” which offers a variety of cosmetic treatments, and more health-related places like “Medical Foot Clinic Dundee”.

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Seems to be about once a week. You can track the last update in the ‘Healthcare’ category here: Data Updates | Robert Whittaker's OpenStreetMap Stuff

It’s like Christmas Morning around here when one of these rows is updated.

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I’ve been enjoying using this tool in the E postcode for the last couple of weeks. Great stuff.

I have a question about the relationship between the two data sources - the CQC and the NHS, which get tagged as e.g. ref:GB:cqc_location=1-541836459 and ref:GB:nhs_ods = F84047 respectively. Some institutions appear on both lists and have both tags.

In the case above, way 868479127 is tagged with ref:GB:cqc_location=1-541836459 already, but the system is showing a light green blob because it doesn’t have the other tag.

That means that to get all the blobs dark green, one has to go around twice, adding the CQC tag, then the NHS tag (a week later following the data getting updated). Is there a way the tool could identify both up front?

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Some of the big providers - NHS, Bupa Dental, Damira Dental, Thérapie Clinic, are in the NSI so iD will suggest the key tags as you go along. (Try adding operator=NHS or Bupa… it’ll fill in the wikidata ref and set operator:type=)

The CQC dataset that Robert’s tool links to will tell you who the operator is (a company, a public org, an individual doctor, etc.). You could set operator:type=private if it seems to be private.

As an aside Thérapie Clinic is identified in NSI as a beauty shop. If some of them are actually healthcare facilities (e.g. in the CQC dataset), then you might need to change the suggested tags to e.g. dermatology or whatever it is.

(NB, you can hit F3 in JOSM to get to the NSI suggestions - but I think it’s a lot less fliud than iD for this particular task)

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Unfortunately, the way I’ve set up the database tables, each entity can only have a single ref value associated with it. For most of the CQC listings that’s ref:GB:cqc_location=* . But for GPs I’ve used ref:GB:nhs_ods=* as there are additional ODS codes for branch surgeries, and these don’t have separate CQC codes. In the tool, the ref value and key it recognises for that object is shown on the popups on the map and in the data tables below - so you should be able to do it in one refresh cycle.

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Hopefully this won’t have much impact, but I’ve just discovered that NSI contains several NHS trusts as operators for amenity=hospital. I’ve no idea why, as they’re unlikely to operate enough sites to justify inclusion.

Unfortunately, someone helpfully added operator:type=private to these and I’ve seen a couple of instances where people blindly accepted it as a tag “upgrade” from iD despite it being obviously wrong.

[EDIT: this has now been merged] Update hospital.json - NHS trusts are operator:type=public, not private by rskedgell · Pull Request #10909 · osmlab/name-suggestion-index · GitHub

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Here’s my video about the Quarterly Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxJPAyQbiqo

After filming that, several of the notes (left for myself) have been resolved by local mappers, to my delight. So I’ve added more notes of missing dentists/doctors. They’re still in areas I will get to, but it will be wonderful if other locals get to them in the next 2 months.