Ordnance Survey – Great Britain's national mapping agency

Ordnance Survey and the ambulance service

08 May 2007

Ordnance Survey data is used everyday by all kinds of organisations, not least in helping to deliver many public services including the ambulance services.  The Department of Health key standards for ambulance services include the requirement to respond to 75% of ambulance category A (life threatening) calls within eight minutes or less, and responding to 95% of Category A calls within 14 minutes in urban areas or 19 minutes in rural areas. Achieving these standards is no mean feat, particularly as the layout of towns is changing all the time. That is why so many ambulance services are turning to automatic vehicle location and routing solutions based on the OS MasterMap ITN Layer.

The main solutions:

Command and Control

- This is based around emergency call taking and the subsequent dispatching of suitable emergency vehicles. OS MasterMap Topography data gives Command and Control operators the additional location information they require to direct ambulance crews to an incident in a more timely manner.

In-vehicle audible and visual route guidance based on the ITN Layer

- A mobile computer system that uses Ordnance Survey products as the basis for generating and displaying the optimum route to incident – this was developed by Terrafix Limited, reputedly the world leader in this field. The advantages of using OS MasterMap ITN Layer is that ambulance crews have a much more comprehensive mapping system, both in their vehicles and in control rooms. In addition, with Ordnance Survey maps ambulance crews have a much higher level of detail. They can identify individual buildings, whereas with a commercial satellite navigation unit they would normally just see area boundaries.

Patient Transport Systems (PTS)

- PTS is largely concerned with the transport of patients to and from hospitals. NHS Trusts are increasingly responsible for transporting patients that are in their care. By using OS MasterMap ITN and Address layer data within the Cleric APTS system to calculate optimum routes ambulance crews are able to collect, deliver and return patients to their home in a more timely manner.

Determining response times automatically

- Mobile data terminal systems instead of computer-based systems are used  to handle control room/vehicle communications eliminating the delays inherent in voice systems and automatically determining accurate response times. 

These solutions have resulted in a number of key benefits for the ambulance services:

Much higher level of detail for ambulance crew
More accurate routing

 

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