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emergency services and what3words


Jim Riley

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5 hours ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

As you are 'on the road' maybe you can answer.

The EM Ambulance driver told me that their onboard system was basically only able to work on map / GPS references (not W3W) and that is why they could respond so quickly and get to within a few yards (the other side of a hedge down a single track lane).

 

Is that correct, or can the Ambulance driver feed W3W into his 'satnav' ?

What a truly ridiculous question!! You really don't get it do you Alan, (de Enfield). Once the emergency service has a position, it doesn't matter what they do with it - I would actually expect it to be converted to a standard internal format. Every single casualty is different, and will have different ways of communicating their position to the services

 

The thing that W3W is good for is communicating a location TO the emergency services, particularly in the absence of your PLB, or your AML positioning, (remember that you told us that 35% of calls dont provide an AML position ;) )

 

Recalling your own situation, you told us that the location that the helicopter ended up at was not very close to your location, so one could wonder whether the W3W location would have resulted in them being closer, or even right on it? Like I said previously, whichever way your actual position was relayed, it did not seem to have been particularly effective.

 

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6 hours ago, andy4502 said:

Hi all, while my control experience is a couple of years out of date I am still working for the service (part time on the road) and can see that the Control computer assigns w3w to all calls as part of location finding.


Quite Andy, and something I said ages ago but AdE won't accept anything that puts W3W in a good light.


I have even had it on one of my job sheets (CVT6010)

Edited by Graham Davis
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6 hours ago, Mike Todd said:

What is the benefit of doing that, other than as background to a call with the customer? The three words do not tell you anything other than a means of discovering the digital position (either lat lng or grid reference) in order to identify a position on a map and thence on the ground. 

 

Quite simply it gives me a perfect "fix" on where I am picking a patient up from, which can often just be a building name in a village, and which can often be several miles from that village, up a mountain. Don't forget that in many rural areas a post code covers a huge area so they are of no use.

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The mobile data systems on vehicles are sent location data by the CAD, this then instructs the sat nav to get to an address. This can sometime go wrong due an incorrect ‘entry point’ or not having an an update with the latest housing/roads etc. 

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