Hello, everyone!
I trust you all had a wonderful beginning to the new year. As you may have (or may not have) noticed, there was no January challenge. The reason is the impetus for this month’s challenge: healthcare.
Quick backstory: at the beginning of the new year, an incident happened through no fault of my own, and I was quite heavily injured. I’m about 75% recovered, and things are getting steadily getting better. The result of the injury took me away from everything for a touch more than two weeks, including OGF. Hence, no January challenge. When I came back, the whole ordeal made me think about how we do healthcare on OGF. Every country is different, and each culture is different. I thought it might be time for a challenge here!
For this month, your challenge is to do something related to healthcare. It could be a hospital, clinic, outpatient practice, pharmacy, surgery center, spa, or even something else. If there is a cultural medicine tradition or a naturalist practice, go ahead and add that! Be creative and have it fit with your country’s culture.
This is a surprisingly hard challenge, however. Remember that not every small town of 3000 people is going to have a hospital. Clinics and urgent-care centers (as they’re called in North America) are often fairly evenly spaced but clustered around population centers. Emergency vehicles need to be able to easily get in and out of many of these facilities too. Consider your traffic flow and where accessible junctions are. Pharmacies are easier to place, but it also depends on how much that country’s government regulates the industry. In other words, placing healthcare facilities means that the community it’s being placed in is relatively planned out already.
If you’re looking for something even more advanced and have a metropolitan area to work with, try to build an entire healthcare network: a couple hospitals, scattered outpatient practices, a surgery center, some pharmacies and clinics, etc. Remember that these places will need to be spaced enough to not compete with each other but close enough together to cover the population. If you are in a heavily-regulated country or one with nationalized medicine, you won’t need to worry about competition from another network. If you want a free-market medicine environment, you’ll need to account for another network in the same area to at least some degree.
Don’t forget to share things below with your fellow mappers. I can’t wait to see what happens!
Good luck on the challenge! And, a belated is-Sena t-Tajba (Happy New Year)!
Comment from varnel_maiser on 2 February 2018 at 20:29
I was doing this in a very rushed manner, but I’m still proud of it. This is Le Centre Médicinal de Bourg-Crévage. It is in the newer section of my largely unfinished city of Bourg-Crévage. It is just a vague outline of the facility (at the time of posting), but it has 3 main buildings (B3 reserved for workplace accidents at the docks just south of it), 3 medical laboratories for conducting research onto medical anomalies, diseases, you name it.
Then, there is the large ambulance garage. This houses all ambulances, helicopters, and any other medical vehicle that serves the facility. There is a clear path from the ambulance garage to the nearby major roads for quicker response times and easy access to farther regions. This is because it is the only major hospital in the area that will be called, ‘Les Soivres’. As well, because the facility is serving such a large area and large population, there are many parking lots for the visitors, patients, and faculty members.
It has received lots of funding from the government as a major hospital that treats the more complex medical situations that the regional hospitals can’t provide.
Thanks, Zekiel
Comment from varnel_maiser on 2 February 2018 at 20:31
If the facility doesn’t render, go to the other layers.
Comment from zhenkang on 2 February 2018 at 23:12
I remember in my 2nd bliki about my method of mapping, I used my mapping of Keppong’s medical district as an example. As you can see, the hospital is just southeast of a medical college.
But besides this, I have not mapped smaller clinics or polyclinics (mini-hospitals) in Keppong yet. I actually wanted to do that, but I kept forgetting to do so. The hospital needs slightly more detailing instead of just buildings and roads.
Healthcare is important especially in an ageing society in Singapore (and Singkangia). The government plans to spend more on healthcare and other age-related stuff this year in the budget.
Besides western medicine clinics, you can have Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) clinics. As Chinese New Year is coming ahead, I also encourage others to map some TCM clinics in their countries for Babelicans in their country!
Comment from zhenkang on 3 February 2018 at 00:25
By the way, may you get weel soon!
Comment from kingfries on 3 February 2018 at 18:06
Well guess I’ll have to start working on the ,,Antarephia Medical Center again. Get well soon
Comment from Aces California on 3 February 2018 at 22:28
Well I hope your recovery finished off quickly Alessa! This is an interesting thing, I can see a lot of charity clinics maybe in rural T-V, maybe they haven’t rebuilt their healthcare services as thoroughly as some other aspects since the war ended just before the 2000s, relying on charities to run rural clinics? Or maybe Pradipi can have some sort of spiritual pseudo-medicine healing. I’ll need to consider this a bit deeper!
Comment from eklas on 5 February 2018 at 17:59
Get well soon! My entry for this month is the state-owned New University Hospital in Odrava - it’s the largest in the country and serves a good third of all residents of the city. I’ve also written a bliki entry about it where you can read everything.
Comment from histor on 7 February 2018 at 14:12
What about the old fashioned style with isolated buildings? In this manner are a lot of hospitals in Latina, erected around 1900 to 1920. [http://opengeofiction.net/#map=16/-10.7368/49.1393]
You can be sure - inside all is modern at at state of the art.
Comment from Sarepava on 11 February 2018 at 20:55
I had to visit the hospital last week after coming off the bicycle. Luckily it was not so serious as to need the A&E department.
http://opengeofiction.net/#map=16/51.0959/112.7936
Osu State Hospital is a typical Karolian city hospital complex, built in the 1950-1960s. The country has state healthcare and so every large town and city has at least one of these concrete installations, which are full of modern equipment but generally stuck in the Brutalist aesthetic. it’s loosely based on the two hospitals in my hometown. Osu serves the lower half of the entire Torjasmaa peninsula and so the medical facilities include specialist eye, children’s and elderly departments, as well as a rehab facility both for injuries and for drug and alcohol addicts.
The hospital generates a percentage of its electrical needs by using the waste incinerator to power a steam turbine. There is also a maintenance facility for ambulances and doctor cars and bikes, and a gym for staff use.
Across the road is the city’s maternity hospital. Typically for Karolia, there is plenty of bicycle parking across both amenities. It is not unheard of for women in labour to cycle to the hospital to give birth.
Comment from LemonKing on 13 February 2018 at 15:56
The Greater Blöndel Area, inhabited by approx. one million people, has two major hospital areas.
Blöndel Central Hospital (Sentrile hospitahl) was built in 1968 to replace the older buildings further south, which were turned into a senior service facility. It consists of big rectangular buildings, the biggest of which is a major landmark with 25 floors: http://opengeofiction.net/#map=16/63.9804/52.9427
The massive building project involved entire remaking of the adjacent street junctions and directing Shordesula river into a tunnel beneath the area. Later, additional smaller buildings were erected and greenfields added in a somewhat desperate attempt to soften the technocratic appearance of the area. An emergency tunnel was built in 1990. It is used mostly for intern light traffic between the buildings, but allows ambulance driving if needed. Hospitahl metro station also serves The Great Stadion and is a vivid one.
At first, the Central hospital served the whole city, and in some specialized areas it still does. But in 1985, a University hospital (Universitile hospitahl) was erected on the north bank of the river, west of the university campus (mapping ongoing for the time being). The buildings are lower and more colorful: http://opengeofiction.net/#map=17/64.01299/52.94158
The new hospital serves the north-western part of the city area, bordering Motorway 2 in south-west and Kvomesula river in north-east.
