Tagging of healthcare facilities

As I have no first-hand experience with them: How restricted are they? Does it depend on the individual location? Do we have a rule of thumb on what time they are typically available?

I would not expect 24/7 (that would be my requirement to tag emergency=yes), but at least some availability during typical working hours.
Doctors often only three hours in the evening.

This is an example, sorry only on Google as searching my imagery stack takes quite long:
https://www.google.com/maps/@18.7827107,98.9816878,3a,75y,284.08h,87.75t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s4duu-2jMH4eVZI0EPp2JeA!2e0!5s20110901T000000!7i13312!8i6656

What I am told is that you have doctors at least on stand-by in case something more urgent. Other services will be provided on appointment.

Can you please share what they typically provide in Health Promoting Hospitals from your perspective? What level of doctors are usually available on-site or on-call? what equipment is usually there? to what level can they handle emergencies? out-patients only?

On what criteria should we decide? the tagging? Could it be whether “in-patients” are treated? So beds for multi-day stays are available? And only then call it hospital? That would then bring us to tag these medical centers “amenity=clinic”, even them having the hospital term in their name.

The wiki currently would guide towards this:

Regarding discussing in Facebook link I shared above, the Subdistrict Health Promoting Hospital is not look like “hospital” in their name.
Staff that usually providing service at Subdistrict Health Promoting Hospital everyday is only nurse, not doctor. Operating hours is mostly around 08:00-16:00 daily, can be slightly different for each. It is providing service as first-aid and non-emergency case.
Doctors that look after each Subdistrict Health Promoting Hospital usually stand-by at District-level hospital, and come to provide service at the Subdistrict Health Promoting Hospital for some day in each month, which is scheduled beforehand.

From wiki:

The Subdistrict Health Promoting Hospital does not have patient overnight stay.

I think this is suited this case more than amenity=hospital.

Thanks for the update.

So for these Health Promoting Hospitals/โรงพยาบาลส่งเสริมสุขภาพตำบล how about this tagging:

The distinction from hospital is then based on the inpatient criteria, as also in the wiki: “Admission of inpatients is not provided”
Adding emergency=no to make it clear that this should be not the first point of contact if you have a heart-attack in the middle of the night. Wiki states this this hospital has no “emergency room”. So should not conflict on their ability to provide first aid in less critical cases.

amenity=clinic
healthcare=clinic
emergency=no
name:en=xxx Health Promoting Hospital
name=xxx
name:th=xxx

I hope these Hospitals are not the 776 in Wikipedia mentioned as

but belong to the category of the health centers. I slightly worry about this due to the frequency I observed them during my road trips.

This would allow us to use the amenity=hospital for these officially classified as hospital by the Ministry of Public Health.

No, the community hospitals is district-level. The Sub-district Health Promoting Hospitals is also described in Wikipedia downwards. There are 9826 of them across the country.

I am very surprised that there are so few in OSM mapped. My feeling was that I had mapped dozens of them, I wonder what I tagged them. Searching for “name”~“โรงพยาบาลส่งเสริมสุขภาพ ?ตำบล.+” returns only 111 POI.
And I just fixed one mis-tagged as hospice.

There must be more of them mapped, given that there are nearly 10k of them. And they have quite large signs. At least the ones I mapped. Any idea what the tagging of the missing ones is?

How about the proposed tagging for them?

Previously, the subdistrict health promoting hospital is called “health station” (สถานีอนามัย). In 2009 they all were upgraded to be subdistrict health promoting hospital (โรงพยาบาลส่งเสริมสุขภาพตำบล—รพ.สต.). However the upgrading is mostly focused more on their name than their services, so some people continued to call them health station. Maybe some mappers still tagged it as “สถานีอนามัย” somewhere in osm.

For the tagging scheme, what I’ve been tagging around Ayutthaya are amenity=doctors, following the semi-consensus in Thai OpenStreetMap Facebook Group. However, I’m open to any new tagging scheme we can have a consensus here.

I quickly searched for “name”~“สถานีอนามัย.*” and found another 29 nodes. 30 percent more, but still only a fraction of the total facilities.

We could review them later. I also remember a few years ago about tagging them as government run offices as the hospital category did not fit. Found some of these old nodes tagged like this by long-term mappers.

Waiting for Paul_012 to comment, who initially started this discussion.

I agree with this suggestion. Personally I’m quite not concerned with the mismatched official names, though it might be a source of confusion for casual/irregular contributors, requiring periodical clean-up to fix mistakes.

We might want to keep a tracking tag to help distinguish these facilities from other types of clinics. Maybe designation=รพ.สต. (or designation=THPH)?

There’s a spreadsheet containing coordinates for all government healthcare facilities at data.go.th. Unfortunately the licence is probably not suitable for mechanical import, but perhaps it could be used for cross-checking?

I am just adding “โรงพยาบาลส่งเสริมสุขภาพตำบล บ้านนาไคร้”. Jo suggested to use “Ban Na Khrai Subdistrict Health Promoting Hospital” instead of “Ban Na Khrai Health Promoting Hospital”, which sounds reasonable.

So the boilerplat template to add would be:

amenity=clinic
healthcare=clinic
emergency=no
name:en=xxx Subdistrict Health Promoting Hospital
name=xxx
name:th=xxx

I updated the presets. If you have it in JOSM it will automatically pick it up on the next regular check of the cache.
https://code.osm-tools.org/latest/josm-thai-presets.zip

The name is quite unique. And mis-tagged places do not use this wording. I suspect that most amenity=hospital in Isaan could be these Health Promoting Hospitals. So no designation required.

In case we document it in the Wiki, I can also link to a different page in the presets (maybe a sub-section of the Thailand page?). Currently it points at amenity=clinic.

Overpass query for hospitals:
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/VAC

A random check directly found Nodes with shortened tagging.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1802406245

For the English name, all varieties of “Subdistrict Health Promoting Hospital”, “Subdistrict Health Promotion Hospital”, “Sub-district Health Promoting Hospital”, “Sub-district Health Promotion Hospital”, “Tambon Health Promoting Hospital” and “Tambon Health Promotion Hospital” appear to be in use on the web. It’s hard to tell if there’s an official preference, since the signs I’ve seen are only in Thai.

Unfortunately there isn’t any official translation for โรงพยาบาลส่งเสริมสุขภาพตำบล.
Since ตำบล have been officially translated to subdistrict, so we should use Subdistrict as the first word. For others, I’m not sure but I think I have seen Promoting more than Promotion.

Based on paul_12’s naming variations I made several Overpass searches to see if I could get a list of all such places in Thailand. My query was to simply retrieve objects having either the tag (amenity=hospital or amenity=clinic) and the word “Subdistrict” **and ** the word “Hospital” in their name:en tag. (A search using the same criteria except to substitute the word “Clinic” for “Hospital” retrieved no results.)

I was surprised to learn that of the 167 found objects none were in the Chiang Mai area. Most are in Issan. Furthermore, only one of those has either the word “Promotion” or “Promoting” in that tag. This was the only one: Ban Khok Klang Subdistrict Health Promoting Hospital. There must be scores of such places that have only a simple amenity tag but no name:en tag. I know I’ve tagged them that way in the past because their Thai names are usually long and tedious for me to translate without a lot of effort.

I think it is going to be very difficult and time-consuming to edit those existing amenities properly without visiting them. The good news (sort of good news, anyway) is that many of the small clinics/hospitals we’re discussing don’t yet have an English name tag and there are only 167 that do.

It’s a good idea to firm up our tagging now before many more of these get added to OSM.

Quite frequently we base on the research the Wikipedia community did before. They call it Health Promoting Hospital
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitals_in_Thailand#Sub-district_Health_Promoting_Hospitals

A cross-check with Google translate also returns Health Promoting Hospital. Removing Tambon then returns Promotion

There seems to be a WHO project with this name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_promoting_hospitals

and they mention a Bangkok charter: https://www.who.int/healthpromotion/conferences/6gchp/bangkok_charter/en/

On the member states Thailand is not listed. So the status is a bit unclear for me.

This document calls them THPH, Tambon Health Promotion Hospital:
https://www.who.int/alliance-hpsr/projects/alliancehpsr_thailandprimasys.pdf?ua=1

This publication and all references call Health Promoting:
https://www.anamai.moph.go.th/ewtadmin/ewt/advisor/download/Factsheet/Eng/FS_Vol2No8E.pdf

So certainly the translation is not uniform. We could settle on one way. As there are usually no English signs around I think other mappers will follow what is the example on existing places or simply use the preset.

Syntax may be a reason to prefer the translated word, as “X Subdistrict Health Promoting Hospital” allows for the natural phrasing of “X Subdistrict” in the name, while “Tambon X” cannot be included in the phrase without either omitting or duplicating the word.

It should be quite easy to identify them based on name alone. Looking at the above-linked Overpass query, most of the currently tagged hospitals appear to be THPHs. Much of the conversion can probably can be done in a spreadsheet, if it’s agreed on.

I’ve re-tagged some 60 individual doctors’ clinics to amenity=doctors / healthcare=doctor (changesets 87414857 and 87414921). I only looked at the names, and changed just the most obvious ones.

First off, thanks for the effort paul_12. This is a comment, sort of an aside, about Google Translate but it bears on this conversation because of how tricky it is to transliterate Thai to English. This is something all non-Thai speaker OSMers struggle with constantly.

When paul_12 posted his reply I checked a few of the clinics and realized he hadn’t added the English transliteration to the ones he updated. Lately, I have been using Google Translate in addition to the Thai-Romanization program to convert long phrases or names to English so I thought it would be interesting to try it on the name of one of the clinics in the first changeset supplied by paul_12. My thinking was that later when I have some time on my hands I would go through those clinics and add the name:en tags to them.

I copied and pasted คลินิกแพทย์หญิงนภปกรณ์ into Google Translate and got this result: “Naphapakorn Clinic”

Sounds fine, right? However, when I put that same Thai name into the Thai Romanization program, it produced this result: “Khlinik Phaet Ying Noppha Pakon”

Disregarding the different spelling renditions for a moment and looking only at the wording, there are more words in the second result than Google’s result. What are those additional words and why did Google ignore them? My wife explained that the words “Phaet Ning” mean that the clinic is staffed by female doctors. For whatever reason, Google ignored this fact, perhaps because they don’t consider it an actual part of the name, but whatever the reason it might be very good for us to tag such places so that a male patient who was uncomfortable with a female doctor or a female patient uncomfortable with a male, could benefit from such knowledge beforehand. Once again, non-Thai speakers mapping in Thailand are flummoxed by the difficulty of properly translating and transliterating Thai to English.

But beyond that, is the gender of the doctors practicing at a particular clinic something we should consider in our tagging? If it is, how should that distinction best be handled? Is there a good way in English to reveal the words Female Doctors or Male Doctors in the clinic name? The words “Phaet Ning” are present in Thai but how would the name look in English if those words were included?

Naphapakorn Clinic (Female doctors), or Naphapakorn Female Doctor Clinic? It’s such a tricky question that Google didn’t even attempt to answer it.

Or we could add a tag, for example, doctors:sex=male/female/mixed, doctors:gender=male/female/mixed, or perhaps gender_type=male/female/mixed?

Only the last one exists presently and it has only about 115 instances.

Alternatively, we can forget about the gender of the practitioners entirely. IMO, however, we will still need to come up with a standard way to handle the gender references in those Thai names.

That’s actually a pretty apt assessment of the issue. He he.

The long answer is that นายแพทย์ (nai phaet) and แพทย์หญิง (phaet ying) are professional titles for male and female doctors, which would normally be translated as just “doctor”, so in this case a usual translation would be “Doctor Naphapakorn’s Clinic” (whatever the spelling). That of course loses the indication of the doctor’s gender. Here, the inclusion of the doctor’s title in the clinic’s name is probably deliberate, as she appears to be an obstetrician, a field where some patients are known to prefer female doctors. Are there natural-sounding options? “Doctoress” doesn’t seem like a good alternative in this century. “Doctor Ms Naphapakorn” might be a workable, if awkward, solution. I think a gender tag will more likely be understood as that of patients.

Ultimately it should of course depend on how the business writes its own name in English. Looking at their Facebook page, there’s a stylised logo that says “NK Clinic”, but it’s so much less informative I don’t think it’s meant to be the actual name. I’d probably do what Google does, drop the gender, and just go with “Doctor Naphapakorn’s Clinic”.

To my understanding the doctor title in Thai simply has gender forms. So using it in Thai sounds natural. It does not sound like someone wanted to emphasize the gender of the doctor, did they?
This is a very fine detail of the language here and probably only to be discussed by native speakers.

I saw some using “Khlinik Mo (Somcha or whatever)i”. I understand that “Mo” a less formal word for a doctor. And having no gender form.
So is the use of the formal title instead of some less formal one really that pushing towards they wanted to have the gender included?

If it really sounds like the gender is important to be in the name, then I would go for “Doctor Ms …” as suggested by Paul. Maybe not that smooth, but it at least keeps the gender, which was skipped in the English language.

BTW: For completeness and enjoyment, in German the title is always “Doktor”. You can address a female with “Frau Doktor”. I also saw sometimes used “Doktorin” when used in a way to describe the role.

Paul_12 said:

Thank you. That helps my understanding quite a bit. The meaning isn’t actually that the clinic is “staffed by female doctors” but that in Thailand a doctor’s official title embodies a gender. I had always thought of Thai as a genderless language (except for the particles “kaa” and “krap”) but languages are full of ambiguities. And I include English in that assessment because it’s loaded with irregular verbs, etc. It’s just as cumbersome for English speakers to use the pronouns “he” and “she” to describe an individual in a sentence but is forced to use “their” when referring to them both in the same sentence; the gender of the subject is lost in that case as well.

I think I agree with Stephan that if we decide it’s important to make the distinction we should prefer to use the official titles “Doctor Ms. …'” and “Doctor Mr. …” but IMO no matter what we decide here, that form is so cumbersome in English I would expect that many Thailand mappers would simply ignore the guideline. Therefore, we might be smart to follow Google’s lead and ignore the issue entirely. Thai speakers will understand the clinic names quite well and after all, this is Thailand, not the UK or USA.

This has been a fun discussion. I’m too old and set in my ways to ever become a competent speaker of Thai but I nevertheless enjoy language related stuff.

Cheers,

Dave