New Category for a Maryland state hospital

Question

I'd like a Free-space for Spring Grove State Hospital, the 2nd oldest continuously operating psychiatric hospital in the USA.

I find no freespaces with it, and there are two categories where it would fit -- Maryland Hospitals and US Homes & Asylums.

Maryland Hospitals has only one hospital and a note not to add individual profiles. I'm new here bit individual hospitals seem appropriate in this category. My preference would be to put it here.

Homes and Asylums would be another option, but there is no Maryland category, so that would have to be created (other M states are here, but not Maryland).

Stigma - finally, as to whether to put a currently operating psychiatric hospital under "Homes & Asylums" -- I would much prefer it go under Hospitals because, well, it is not an "Asylum", which is an old stigmatized term that separates people with brain disorders from people with other medical conditions. As a psychiatrist, I strongly advocate for non-stigmatized approaches to categorizing things related to psychiatric conditions.

So, can I add Spring_Grove_Hospital as a free-space under Maryland_Hospitals, even though it says not to add individual profiles there?

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Answer 1

You can add it to both of those parent categories. The place has been around for a very long time and has had some name changes. If you are talking about adding the modern name, leave it out of asylums. Personally, I would love to dismantle that whole "homes and asylums" bunch of categories and call them all "health facilities" and call it a day. It is not our goal here to be a copy of other Wikis out there in the internet. (I have seen the wiki for all sorts of "homes and asylums" of the past).

So, a bit of an issue with adding TOP LEVEL to categories to keep out individual profiles, it also makes it difficult because you can't add free-space pages via the category picking tool. BUT you can manually add the category to the free-space page. Yes, it's a profile, but it doesn't represent an individual person, so it is acceptable.

Comments

Beautiful. That covers it all. Appreciated. 

And... I agree with Natalie, that "Categories:Healthcare_Facilities" would cover the waterfront to capture Hospitals, Homes&Asylums, and maybe a few others. The subcategories could follow a standard that already exists, such as CMS POS codes (place of service). Do you all use others' category standards around here?  If CMS (which is USA) is too localized, then HL7.org may have an international standard on terminologies for healthcare facilities. 

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No, I don't think that we need the CMS POS codes, as we're not a health care provider. Most of those terms are modern and would not necessarily be helpful with pre-21st century profiles. Since we don't create categories until we need them for a profile, we wouldn't need a category for "Comprehensive Outpatient Rehabilitation Facilities" anytime soon. :-)

For now, hospitals should fit the bill. I can't just re-do Homes and Asylums without a g2g discussion, though, which I''m not ready to do right now. I'll put that down in my "TO DO" scratchpad. Thanks for providing this input, S.