What3Words: What’s it all about?
During a recent training session, a discussion arose around the importance of giving precise and accurate information to the emergency services, especially accurate location information. One of the learners on the course worked as an outward-bound instructor in charge of young people often in remote or rural locations.
Often, especially in the UK we can take for granted that postcodes and street addresses will be enough for the emergency services to find us in times of need. Afterall, areas of the UK in comparison to say Alaska are relatively nuclear in terms of geography. However, in my experience there is a surprisingly common problem in relation to incident and patient locations. I started my ambulance career in London, and you would think that in a city with such a dense population and tightly packed streets that it would be difficult to get wrong. I recall an incident on a large golf course on the outskirts of London where a patient had reported some rather serious symptoms indicating that they may be having a heart attack. After arriving at the given location, it soon became clear that the 18-hole course was vast, and it dawned on us that finding the patient was going to be a lot more difficult than we had hoped. Now, working in the rural Norfolk countryside these challenges are more frequent, especially along the North Norfolk coastline. It can be difficult to extract GPS or OS grid references from apps such as Google Maps and who carries a map nowadays?
I’ve been aware of an App called What3words for some time, but I’ve observed that the app perhaps isn’t as widely known as I had thought.
What3words is a free application available on most smartphones. The developers divided the world (yes, the WORLD) into 3 metre squares and gave each square a unique combination of three words. The great thing about the app is that it relies on GPS, so even if you don’t have a data connection in a remote location you can still find your 3-word location and relay this to the 999 operators. This makes it super easy to find and share exact locations.
If you’re planning a trip, you can also scout locations on your smartphone and let people know where you’re supposed to be at a certain time. Or if planning an event, you could attach a what3words location to a briefing document.
In my opinion What3words is a game changer in terms of gaining precise location information and it is my strong belief that this can lead to a great improvement in response times to very ill or seriously injured patients and ultimately help us to preserve life, prevent further injury and promote recovery.
You can download What3words using the Google Play and App Store buttons at the top of this post.
We’d love to hear of any success stories you’ve had using What3words.
