Location technology saving lives? Possibly not.

This week I glimpsed fist-hand the rather disconcerting evidence that the use of location still has a long way to go in our emergency services.

As you may or may not know, I'm a fairly keen runner and hence when I'm away from home working I endeavour to get out for a few miles each day. Now earlier in the week my run along the canal towpath in Leeds took a rather eventful turn as I came across a chap who had apparently suffered from some sort of seizure and was lying prostrate on the ground.

Now I wasn't first on the scene, but it had clearly happened moments before, and along with the chap's friend a number of cyclists and runners had stopped. His friend told us that the young man had a similar episode about 3 weeks ago and was having some checks, so after the man was placed into the recovery position his friend was told to call 999 as he clearly needed help. Now the problem was, although we were only a couple of miles from Leeds city centre, we were at a rather secluded stretch of canal next to large electricity substation and brownfield industrial land.

Now obviously the operator asked for our location, but since we couldn't provide an address this started proving problematic. No one (not even the locals) could determine where the nearest access road would be or even roughly where along the canal we were with any certainty. After a little while we then realised we had decimal lat/long coordinates available via our GPS watches - aha! problem solved and location technology saves the day?

No.

Unfortunately the operator didn't want the coordinates as they couldn't do anything with them! Hmmm. Now admittedly we were in a heavily urban area where I'm sure >99% of the emergency responders can be dispatched to addresses or addressable landmarks, but I was amazed that a control centre couldn't take coordinates. After all just typing the coordinates directly into Google would return a map pinpointing our exact location! (which I tested successfully post event).

Surely the same isn't true everywhere; as I can't believe emergency operators for more rural or National Park areas can't get coordinates (BNG or lat/long) from runners, hikers, climber etc. Indeed I'm certain the emergency response system in questions can surely take coordinates - maybe it was a lack of operating knowledge / training? Whichever it was, it isn't very satisfactory.

Now eventually (and I do mean eventually) the emergency responder managed to find us and arrived on the scene. Fortunately in the passing minutes the chap didn't require any further life-saving intervention - indeed after first vomiting he then started to come round - although was clearly still in a state of shock. SO in the words of the bard; all's well that ends well, I guess.

Now as a footnote to this story - upon the arrival of the uniformed medic the chap decided he didn't want treatment and much to the dismay of his well meaning friend (and the rest of us who'd at least tried to help) he walked off down the towpath! All the paramedic could do was shrug his shoulders and say, "Well if he doesn't want my help there's not a lot I can do" which I guess in itself must be a frustratingly regular occurrence for the emergency services.