In R I am able to read in Open Street Map files, however, I am unsure of how I access attribute data such as hospitals, cash points etc, in order to analyse it against other data?
Any ideas?
Sorry if I’m misinterpreting your question, but it’s not clear whether you don’t know how OSM stores attribute data or you do know, but just can’t get to it in R.
If the former, I’d start by just exporting a very small area of data from openstreetmap.org and looking at it with a text editor, and comparing that with what http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Elements says.
If the latter, maybe trying a more R-familiar place - perhaps http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=[r]+openstreetmap ?