It was suggested that trying to increase our mapping of public Defibrillators would be a good think. After a bit of digging, it seems that Ambulance Services typically maintain a list of locations, with a view to informing people about them if a 999 call comes in nearby where one might be useful.
The different services seem to take quite different views on these lists. My local service (East of England) actively publicise their list (http://www.eastamb.nhs.uk/Get-involved/Community-Public-Access-Defibrillators.htm) on the grounds that raising awareness of the locations will make it more likely that someone will know about and find a defibrillator in an emergency. Other services have refused FOI requests on the (IMO spurious) grounds that publicising the list will make thefts / vandalism more likely, and out of date information may lead to people wasting time in an emergency. Anyway, I've taken the East of England list from http://www.eastamb.nhs.uk/Get%20involved/CPADs/CPAD%20List.pdf , and done a comparison with the OSM data. A rough and ready tool can be found at http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/defib/progress/ for any other locals who want to use it. We've got a small number of locations they haven't, and some of their postcodes may not be quite right. But there are a lot on their list that aren't mapped yet! Regarding tagging, it seems that a lot of the cabinets have a reference number on the outside, so I'd suggest recording that in the ref=* tag. Also, I think a description of the location would be useful (e.g. "Outside wall of McDonalds, facing Store 21") to help people find the defibrillator when they need it. I've been putting something like that in a location=* key. In terms of getting more data, I've put in FOI requests to the East and West Midlands Ambulance Services for starters, so we'll see what line they take... Best wishes, Robert. -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
