Location
A location is a physical place inside a facility where care happens or resources sit — a building, a wing, a ward, a room, or a single bed. Locations form a nested tree that mirrors the real geography of your facility, so the platform can answer questions like "which bed is this patient in?" and "who is allowed into this ward?".
What it represents
In Care's FHIR-aligned model, a location maps to the Location resource. Each location records:
- What kind of place it is — a name, a description, and a physical form such as ward, room, or bed
- Where it sits in the tree — its parent and children, since every place can nest inside a larger one and hold smaller ones, with no fixed limit on depth
- Whether it is usable — and, for beds and rooms, a finer operational state (occupied, unoccupied, housekeeping, contaminated, isolated, closed)
- Who is in it — the encounter, if any, currently occupying the place (most meaningful for a bed)
- Who may work there — the organizations granted access to this part of the facility
A location is a place, not a department or a team. A ward as a physical space is a location; the unit of staff and responsibility that runs it is an organization. The two are linked, but they are different primitives — you nest places inside places, and you grant an organization access to a place.
Classification
Two attributes describe what a location is, and they are fixed when it is created.
- Mode separates a kind of place from a concrete instance of one. A
kindis a class of location — "a ward", "a building" — and can contain children. Aninstanceis one specific place — "Bed 12", "Room 4" — and is a leaf: instances cannot have children. - Form is the physical type, drawn from a standard FHIR list: site, building, wing, ward, level, corridor, room, bed, vehicle, house, and more. This is what lets a deployment model the difference between a wing and the beds inside it.
Beds are not a separate concept in Care — a bed is simply a location whose form is bed and whose mode is instance. The whole facility map, from building down to bed, is one uniform tree.
Lifecycle
A location's own status is deliberately simple — it describes whether the place exists and is usable, not whether someone is in it.
active → inactive
(unknown)
- active — the location is live and can be used for encounters and assignments
- inactive — retired from routine use but kept for history; it does not disappear
- unknown — status has not been determined
Separately, beds and rooms carry an operational status that changes far more often: occupied, unoccupied, housekeeping, contaminated, isolated, or closed. This is the day-to-day signal a bed-management board reads, and it is distinct from the location simply being active.
How it connects
Locations are the spatial backbone that other primitives attach to.
- Encounters occupy locations over time. When a patient is admitted to a bed, a record captures which place, when occupancy began, and whether it is planned, active, reserved, or completed. From these records the platform derives a location's current encounter and whether it is free or reserved — which is how a bed knows it is taken.
- Organizations are granted access to locations. Giving a facility organization access to a ward lets every user under that organization work in the ward and its descendants, through the role they hold. Access flows downward: grant it at the building and it reaches every room and bed inside.
- Facility owns the whole tree. Every location belongs to exactly one facility, and the root of its tree sits at the facility level.
One important consequence of the tree: access and other inherited properties cascade to descendants asynchronously. When you change who can reach a ward, the rooms and beds beneath it settle a moment later rather than instantly — expect it to be eventually consistent, not immediate.
Permissions
Access to locations is governed by facility-level permissions. Viewing the location tree is open to most clinical roles; changing the tree or its access grants is reserved for administrators and senior staff.
| Permission | Description | System Roles |
|---|---|---|
can_write_facility_locations | Create, edit, or delete a location, and add or remove an organization's access to one (add a ward, room, or bed; change status; grant org access) | Facility Admin, Admin, Staff |
can_create_facility_organization | Create a root location (one with no parent) at the top of the facility tree | Facility Admin |
can_list_facility_locations | View a facility's locations, the location tree, and which organizations have access to a location | Admin, Doctor, Facility Admin, Administrator, Nurse, Staff, Pharmacist |
can_manage_facility_organization | Grant or change an organization's access to a location | Facility Admin, Administrator |
can_write_encounter | Assign or move an encounter (a patient) to a location, such as placing them in a bed | Admin, Doctor, Nurse, Facility Admin |
Roles are granted through facility and organization memberships, and because location access follows the tree, a permission held at a parent location cascades down to everything nested beneath it.
Related
- Reference: Location (technical)
- Concept: Facility
- Concept: Facility organization
- Concept: Encounter
FHIR reference
Care's location aligns with the FHIR Location resource, including its mode (kind / instance), physical-form codes, and operational-status codes for beds and rooms.