I wanted to add all the huisartsenwachtpost (BE-Dutch) / Postes médicaux de garde (BE-French) in Belgium. These are places where a general practitioner is available outside of regular office hours, and where you can get urgent care for things that a GP can take care of. This system is in place largely to avoid queues in the Emergency wards, and to make the out-of-hours duties of GPs more efficient.
Similar concepts exist elsewhere:
- Huisartsenposten (NL) > obligatory (?) step before going to the Emergency Ward
- Urgent treatment centres (UK) > Urgent treatment centres (UTCs) provide urgent medical help when it’s not a life-threatening emergency.
Open at least 12 hours a day, every day, UTCs offer appointments that can be booked through NHS 111 (telephone and online) and are equipped to investigate, diagnose, and deal with many of the most common injuries and illnesses people attend Emergency Departments (A&E) for. ( NHS England » Urgent treatment centres ) - Bereitschaftspraxis (DE) > “on call practices”, “Notdienst”, 116117
- Urgent care centre (US) > out of office urgent care for non-emergency situations
When looking for a proper tag, I settled on amenity=doctors + healthcare:speciality=emergency, because the phrasing on the wiki seems like a fit: These cases are usually handled at a “first aid medical station,” which is a medical facility that is open permanently or at least outside the regular office hours of general practitioners (nights, weekends, holidays).
But digging a little deeper, I guess the whole topic is in need of some refining.
We have:
- Emergency ward wiki
Which describes:
- entrance is indicated emergency=emergency_ward_entrance
- facility itself: just as amenity=clinic + emergency=yes or sometimes healthcare=emergency_ward
- healthcare:speciality=urgent. The place where admissions into a hospital are triaged
“Emergency Room,” “Emergency,” or “Urgent Admissions,” - healthcare:speciality=emergency
The service of people specialising in immediate medical attention.
The difference between 2 and 3 seems pretty small and doesn’t seem to follow default definitions in the sector. E.g. this text from the NHS in the UK:
- Emergency care involves life-threatening illnesses or accidents which require immediate treatment from the ambulance service (via 999) and an emergency department (A&E).
- Urgent care involves any non-life-threatening illness or injury needing urgent attention which might be dealt with by phone consultation through the NHS111 Clinical Assessment Service, pharmacy advice, out-of-hours GP appointments, and/or referral to an urgent treatment centre (UTC).
While the text is from the UK, considering the “urgent care centers” in the US, I assume the meaning is relatively universal.
So to me, it seems like we should adapt the urgent/emergency pages to make that same distinction: emergency is for life threatening problems and things that have to be dealt with now, urgent for other things that should be dealt with soon
So all the examples at the top of this post would be amenity=doctors|clinic|whatever with healthcare:speciality=urgent
I also got the suggestion to use out-of-hours_service=yes or simply rely on opening_hours . The former would work for me, but would be completely new. The latter seem unpractical and miss the specificity of the service offered (it’s not simply a GP open at night, because you’re not going there for non-urgent things).