Mapping Defibrillator Not-spots

Mapping Defibrillator Not-spots

Overview

You can use Parish Online Mapping to plot the locations of defibrillators and share this information on your website using the Public Map facility (Using the Public Map). Once you've built up the map of existing locations, it might be useful to see where you've got areas without nearby defibrillators. Here are two ways of doing that:

Using the Annotate tool

The Annotate tool has the ability to create circles of a fixed radius. So you can place circles over each defibrillator location to get a sense of where there are gaps. This is simple to do, but relatively coarse as a method as it doesn't take into account the underlying path network.


Using the Isochrone tool

This method uses the built-in isochrone tool, which uses the road and path network to give you a more accurate idea of how far you can get in 5, 10, 15 min walking, for example. To set this up I'm going to do two things first:
  1. Create a new layer called "Defib Not-spots". I'm going to include a column called "walking time" and set it to "Number".
  2. Go to Tools then Isochrone, select Walking, set time values (in this example I use 1, 3 and 5 minutes. Getting to someone within 5 minutes from CPR switching to Defibrillation is good [citation needed]! I'm assuming someone running can get to a defib and back in 5 minutes. Click on the centre of a defibrillator location and it'll calculate the areas.
  3. Click Save in the Isochrone panel. Select your new layer and set the time to "walking time" (or whatever you chose to set it to). Click Save again.
  4. Go into the styling and set it up so you've got something like this below.

You'll now have something like this:


Let's keep going and add the other ones:


Now I have the current state of my defibrillator distribution, I can use the Isochrone tool to experiment with where the best place would be to plug the gaps. For example, I could place one here near the recreation ground:


This is now a useful interactive tool for seeing your distribution and for plotting where others should go. Hopefully your work will save lives.

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