The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Not moved. Governments are not consistent in their terminology, and the editors here haven't reached a consensus either. It looks like the proposed move intends to make the article cover health departments at a national level, whether or not they are called ministries. The present article includes both national and local departments, so the content of this article is not yet consistent with the proposed 'Ministry of health' topic. EdJohnston (talk) 02:53, 27 April 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Health department → Ministry of Health – Health department is a much less frequently used term globally, as you can see perusing the Category:Health ministries category. In wikipedia, we have Ministry (government department), Category:Ministries_by_portfolio, Category:Health ministries, and so on, so it makes sense to rename this as Ministry of Health. Relisted. BDD (talk) 16:35, 15 April 2013 (UTC) Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 21:16, 29 March 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Comment Health ministry currently redirects to the list, and not this article. And why not use that title? "health ministry" ; also, doesn't "ministry of health" imply ministerial level bureaucracy? Wouldn't "department" be lacking of such a problem, when many are not ministerial level. -- 65.92.180.137 (talk) 07:12, 30 March 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I've proposed a merge with the list as well, so all the redirects would be pointed to the same place - I don't see a need to maintain two lists of health ministries/departments. I prefer Ministry of Health - we have Ministry_of_Science, Ministry_of_Communications for example, and to me it just seems like the more formal/complete name and in the health sector it is almost always referred to as Ministry of Health (or MoH) as opposed to Health ministry. As to your final point re: department vs ministry, it's an interesting question, but I'm not really convinced that the existence of lower-level departments is significant enough to merit an article (with it's own title) vs. a Ministry-level article.As it turns out, there already are two articles about the lower-level departments A Ministry will likely always be national or sub-national level, but not local/municipal. By the existence of other Ministry-titled articles, it seems that's the direction the wiki-consensus is heading, and this is the only one which is out of place. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 12:13, 30 March 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Many cities have departments of health, and departments of public health. They are concerned with local heath policy and medical and health facilities and access. Typhoid Mary was confined on the orders of the local health authority. -- 65.92.180.137 (talk) 03:18, 31 March 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Tough one. Per WP:RETAIN, we shouldn't change. Per the consistency part of WP:CRITERIA, we should. --BDD (talk) 20:16, 1 April 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• comment Note: We already have Local health department and State health agency; I think those two articles could be reworked to capture the totality of sub-national health departments. I do think that there is a place for an independent article about national-level ministries - which are also called departments in a few countries but much more commonly called Ministries of Health. This article, due to it's current contents, categorization, and redirects, it the best candidate for renaming (also to preserve the history).--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 19:29, 15 April 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • "State health agency" does not work for subnational entities, since many of them are called "ministry of health", because the subnational entities have ministries. Further national entities are called "states". -- 70.24.250.103 (talk) 00:02, 16 April 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• I would support such a move. I think we should generally have a series of articles titled "Ministry of (Foo)" for each area of specialization for which national a large number of national governments tend to have an agency. Right now we have a scattered mix of pages serving this function under different names, and disambiguation pages. bd2412 T 21:40, 15 April 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• If health department and health ministry are the same then WP:RETAIN probably gains weight for Keep. I'll say that the article is not well written which really makes the call here difficult. Part of the issue here is that we have national, subnational and local organizations with different naming. Another option is to split if they are different. The last option would be to deal with the groupings in the category structure using the names applied by country. Vegaswikian (talk) 06:09, 23 April 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.