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That’s what worries me about W3W, they are set up as a business with investors that will want a return on that soon. I cannot see any other way for those investments to be recouped other than charging for access to their service, either by charging for each request or for downloading the app.
I doubt their business model is to make money from emergency service use. That's just smart marketing - gets stories in the press (free advertising) and adoption rates up, credibility but surely their aim is for delivery services etc? Especially in parts of the world where postcodes are less helpful than the UK - but even here:
This should give a postcode if your phone knows its location and has data:
https://www.whatsmypostcode.com/
That's obviously created by someone who's never been outside a city! Once you get rural postcodes cover huge areas. Here, even in a town with 10-15k people my house with postcode AND house number either brings you right to the door or dumps you 100 yards away with a flight of stairs and no signs to direct you to where I live depending on your sat-nav. If I have a heart attack I'm hoping that the Ambulance don't use the same sat-nav/post code database as Uber!
The CG wouldn’t be able to winch the casualty without assistance in this case.
I look forward to seeing this on the TV.
Air ambulance was there in 30mins +10 getting to the point where the casualty was, MRT was another 30 mins before their first people got to the casualty.
But you don't know how much time was wasted whilst the ambulance service called the police to ask for the MRT - maybe only a few minutes, but often its surprisingly long (same goes for calling coastguard when its on cliff/beach).
CG was initiated by air ambulance. It arrived after the MRT.
Maybe, and each situation is different, if the first 999 call had gone to police then they'd have initiated the CG getting them there sooner.
All the helo support was on the edge for flying conditions.
That's certainly how the TV show will present it - doesn't make good TV to be a routine operation! However, I'd say if it was marginal for the CG helo, most air ambulances would already be grounded.
My view is that relying on one system to get a location is a fundamental error. Not mobilising because you need the location from a proprietary system and no other source is verging on negligence.
I agree, I do a bit of stuff at sea and whenever I give a location try to give Lat/Long AND a distance/bearing from a landmark because if I jumble a digit or the person typing it in misses a minus sign it makes a big difference. (It also helps anyone else on VHF as "3 mies SW of XYZ" is a lot more meaningful to the person who might come to your aid than some a GPS location - I have overheard Belfast Coastguard ask a caller on VHF for a W3W location when they were struggling to understand a call on the radio).
Drac
Well, they’re not I’ve spent a good bit of time in the EOC the last year and was on standby to head down last night for a possible incident. They can use W3W, postcode, OS Grid reference and longitude latitude. They are not forced to use one system, they can choose from the options.
From the 1/2 of the conversation I listened to and the filling in by the Tom paramedic/guide it didn't seem like the SWAS (if that is who he called) had any choice in using any other system.
The only possibility would seem to be the operator refusing on their own bat because they got out of bed the wrong side but given the seriousness of the injury that seems far fetched... but what Tom said they told him is they didn't have the facility to use anything else. (Equally they may have been untrained to use any other system... but the outcome is the same)
Perhaps a half way and the operator was told to "strongly encourage"?
Ultimately though does it matter? Tom was forced to walk to get a signal and download W3W before they would process the call any further.
I'm not normally one to condone people calling the ambulance at the drop of a hat... its not like they have spare resources and somewhere someone is lying in a ditch with a fractured spine whilst the ambulance is treating someone with a minor scrape or broken arm etc. who could have made it to a minor injuries clinic by themselves or with friends but in this case a spine board and paramedics were absolutely required...
It’s entirely possible the call taker got stuck in the algorithm they follow, there is no reason to stick asking for a postcode as people tend to know much more than their home address. I can’t possible comment on the rationale beyond that without more information. I will say though as someone who deals with investigations, perceptions of what happened by all parties are very different to what went on. There is also often a series of small events that lead to something not going well.
The basic question to ask is if someone doesn’t know exactly where they are is where they started and where they were heading, last place they knew they past. MR can bounce a txt to mobiles which when responded to can provide a location.
I doubt their business model is to make money from emergency service use.
I doubt that as well as it's bad publicity but once they have the market to squeeze who knows?
That’s just smart marketing – gets stories in the press (free advertising) and adoption rates up, credibility but surely their aim is for delivery services etc? Especially in parts of the world where postcodes are less helpful than the UK – but even here:
They don't need stories in the press as such... Channel4ventures is a lead investor (swapping TV advertising for equity)
Channel 4 Ventures offers high potential brands the opportunity to accelerate their growth through TV advertising, in exchange for an equity stake in the business.
https://www.channel4ventures.com/
My objection is forcing someone to download a closed proprietary system in return for medical assistance.
Whichever way I look at that is is just wrong.They can target the voluntary/emergency services and if they say no they can publicise to the donors that they are refusing to use a free system... again just wrong.
Their refusal to share the algorithm doesn't bode well... especially given the tie in with the UK emergency and volunteer services because this is their only way to get people to download it.
After this who knows...Tesco or Aldi may sign up (or not) but it is leveraging the emergency services to establish their base that I can't feel is right.
I'm not a supporter of W3W but at least it's replaced what I understood to be the previous ambulance service default of postcode.
It doesn't surprise me that one ambulance controller insisted on W3W, but that doesn't mean it's a policy. Every job has its incompetents and mavericks as well as people who just have a bad day and get things wrong.
That’s certainly how the TV show will present it – doesn’t make good TV to be a routine operation! However, I’d say if it was marginal for the CG helo, most air ambulances would already be grounded.
The wind was fluctuating, the air ambulance got in at the top after thinking about it for a bit. They apparently tried to move closer and the wind changed their mind. The casualty was below some cliffs about 100m downslope and it was quite calm there. Issue for CG was wind above the escarpment for their hover. However they got the winchman in and the plan changed to winch much to the relief of the MRT who would have had two bad options to haul out.
Great article on the front page about W3W now:
https://singletrackworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/is-what3words-really-that-bad-or-good-lets-ask-mountain-rescue/
Great article from Keeper of the Peak predating STW by a year.
https://kofthep.com/2020/08/14/i-am-lost/
pdw
Free MemberI disagree. The tool doesn’t give the lack of ambiguity in location that its sellers claim. It’s been demonstrated that there are many confusable pairs within a confusable distance of each other.
OK but while that's true, every single grid ref has countless confusable pairs within a confusable distance of each other.
I think it's fair to say that W3W's "confusing mismatch" avoidance hasn't delivered as well as it should, or as well as they promised, and yes that's a big deal. But grid refs essentially have confusing mismatches designed in, and absolutely zero avoidance. So the question then is, is W3W's flawed system automatically worse for its flaws than the common alternatives. Or if you prefer, is it a net gain despite failures.
It's a lot like self-driving cars, where you don't have to have a perfect system, to possibly outperform the system that's currently in use, but people will always fixate on the "new" risk.
(I guess should probably say I've been a bit of an enthusiast for W3W, basically for 2 reasons- the way it's gained acceptance in the general public which no other location finding app has managed, and the apparent cleverness of the algorithm. So I'm pretty pissed off that a chunk of that is now proven to be so flawed and with the apparent behaviour of the company. But it still feels a lot like it migt be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)
As per the KotP link above (if I've remembered it correctly)... Emergency services know their patch so if a grid reference is out then they can approximate it.
53.7132290, -2.0960360 is STW HQ. If someone gave 63.713, -2.096 well that's the Faroe Islands so clearly wrong and Calderdale emergency services wouldn't be called for that so an educated guess is needed.
Linguists.enlighten.chatting is also STW HQ but linguists.lighten.chatting is in Algeria. There's no way to educated guess that.
It's very easy for misheard words especially if it's poor weather, poor connection or strong accent.
The other thing is I can send my location via signal, WhatsApp, Google and Strava without me having to know any words or numbers. If In doubt people tend to use sarloc (sp?) to find people, again without having to find and repeat words and numbers.
Not read either the STW or KOTP articles but another year of MRT experience should say a lot for something that hasn’t been around very long. Commentators on here clearly saying the adoption is evolving.
Great article on the front page about W3W now:
Did it answer the question it posed?
No ...and I wrote it!
* although strictly speaking I didn't exactly set out to answer that question... editors eh? 😉
Had a good chat about W3W on a MRT exercise on sunday, concensus is that it's not for us. Something that was set up and put out freely, and is then gonna be chargeable once everyones using it, the amazon prime of mapping.
I guess the issue is that the mountains and fells are in the north of the country. If they were in the south there would be far less communication and mispronunciation issues.
It sounds like communication and training issues on a broader spectrum of different teams and organisations before you even mention w3w. Introducing something new that seems to be voluntarily used is going to cause some confusion.
According to the article 85% of calls are successful, but that 15% could still be catastrophic.
An issue with W3W is that words are inherently easier to mishear on a phone call than numbers. If you consider that someone on a 999 call is probably not at their calmest and most rational and may well be passing you W3W provided to them by someone else nearby who's got the app open while they make the call it's very easy to end up with wrong words and particularly easy to lose plurals. Even if you phonetically confirm the W3W back to them they're quite likely to agree with you even if it's incorrect so you need to confirm location from other descriptions they give you.
so you need to confirm location from other descriptions they give you.
Without wishing to re-open this debate, if you read back through the thread there's a MR team call handler who describes the process they use, in short they try not to rely on just one method of location, and triangulate using several unrelated systems.
I know - I'm a police call handler.
An issue with W3W is that words are inherently easier to mishear on a phone call than numbers.
1. I'm not convinced about that; 2. Reading out numbers on a phone call is more likely to jumble digits, than mix the order of the words.
If you consider that someone on a 999 call is probably not at their calmest and most rational and may well be passing you W3W provided to them by someone else nearby who’s got the app open while they make the call it’s very easy to end up with wrong words and particularly easy to lose plurals.
As soon as you add multiple stressed people in a chain of communication there is a risk of transposition error, the screen reader, the caller, the call handler, the person who passes to MRT, the MRT leader to the team etc. Any sensible system would have a check sum / check digit / check word so that it was essentially impossible to think you have a good ref when its not. The same issue applies to all the other methods of location info.
so you need to confirm location from other descriptions they give you.
Exactly - its obvious from the article that many of the mistakes are so far out nobody could think they are real.
According to the article 85% of calls are successful, but that 15% could still be catastrophic.
The question is what were the stats in a pre-W3W world?
A huge amount of MRT situations are now found using their own mobile phone location, and quite often talked off the hill in the case of folks being unsure of where they are and fit to walk.
Without wishing to re-open this debate, if you read back through the thread there’s a MR team call handler who describes the process they use, in short they try not to rely on just one method of location, and triangulate using several unrelated systems.
The one occasion I've had to call MR out (for a friend, MTBing accident), I gave an 8-figure grid ref off my GPS - this was in the early days of consumer GPS units and it was mainly designed for walking so it actually gave out proper grid references rather than simply using GPS as a basis for speed and performance metrics.
MR asked where I was in addition to that (even though they knew the ref I was giving them was off a GPS unit, you can't do 8-fig off a 1:50k OS Map!) and, because I knew the route very well, I was able to tell them the exact location. Castle Crag, approx one mile south of Grange at the southern end of Derwent Water. To them, that was simply confirmation that I'd read the grid ref correctly.
Also, hats off to MR, they were amazing.
If you read back through the thread there’s a MR team call handler who describes the process they use, in short they try not to rely on just one method of location, and triangulate using several unrelated systems.
I had a good conversation about this a few weeks ago with a MR team member for the Brecon Beacons and he said the same thing. When out in the hills I always have my phone with me that can generate a location using W3W, co-ordinates and be used for their app/text pinging system plus I always carry my Garmin bike GPS (even when walking) that can generate co-ordinates and a OS grid reference as it has OS 1:50k maps on it. For unfamiliar areas I'll take a physical map too. He agreed that I had most bases covered, knowing my route and local landmarks would be the extra help they would need. I've only ever had to call for help once when I found a walker with a broken leg on Table Mountain but that was an easy location to describe (right by the stone mound at the summit, they had fallen off it after a strong gust of wind) so have never had to rely on tech to locate me i an emergency thankfully!
1. I’m not convinced about that; 2. Reading out numbers on a phone call is more likely to jumble digits, than mix the order of the words.
That's not what I was saying. Reading numbers or words in the wrong order is a different issue. If someone is reading number digits to you there are only 10 digits and they sound quite different even in strong accents / dialects. There's thousands of words in English, lots of which sound similar, can be changed to sound like other words depending on accent / dialect and with the W3W system there's no context of a sentence to help you identify a misheard word.
At Gisburn yesterday and noticed that the new trail marker posts now have both OS grid and what3words references.
Interestingly, it was easy to memorise the three words for the duration of each section as you passed them. Not sure how much practical use that would be, but was a fun observation 🙂
The focus of these conversations seems to be around mis-pronunciation, plurals etc. Perhaps the biggest issue with W3W is that if you have not closed the app since the last time you used it, when you open it in a panic the three word location will still be where you were the last time you used the app, not where you are right now. To prevent this you need to either close down the app each time or hit the little arrow in the circle to move to current location.
Sounds obvious but easily missed if you mate has just fallen off a cliff and is about to die to death!
I tried to use this the other day to find a location in a semi thick block of woodland. Downloaded it on the spot, so not experienced with it, had the location sent to us, and even with 2 of us on different phones we couldnt zero in on the exact spot. Got within a a dozen squares or so but beyond that couldn't get bang on, GPS lag/accuracy caused issues. If we were looking for a body we wouldn't have found it. Seemed like a reasonable test from a user perspective which didnt go that well.
Just popped up on my FB feed from the local MRT
"This afternoon the team were called out by Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust and Gwent Police to an incident in the Black Mountains. A woman had injured her hip while out walking and enjoying this lovely weather.
Contacting the emergency services, they gave their what3words location, however unfortunately this did place them about 10 miles away in a different part of Monmouthshire.
After further investigation and information from a local resident, we were able to determine that she was in the Grwyne Fawr valley.
17 team members responded and working with the paramedics able to extract the lady to a waiting ambulance.
We wish her a fall and speedy recovery."
Make of that what you will 🙂
So, what we need is a reduced vocabulary and more words?
Might I suggest a vocabulary of 36 words and we use 8 to determine a location? Mostly, we'd only need 10 words and use 6 of them.
Contacting the emergency services, they gave their what3words location, however unfortunately this did place them about 10 miles away in a different part of Monmouthshire.
After further investigation and information from a local resident, we were able to determine that she was in the Grwyne Fawr valley.
It'd be interesting to know the location given and the nature of the error - mispronunciation, misreading the words, call handler hearing a different word...
I see people keep talking about sending or using a postcode; do people not realise that a postcode can cover a significant area, especially in rural regions. I can recall any number of occasions when going to pick up a car from a client in Devon, Dorset, Cornwall, etc, where we were given a house name and a postcode, and then spent absolutely ages driving along a road following the satnav, and getting literally nowhere, then tried phoning the client for directions, which raised another issue with cellphone coverage in rural areas.
After nearly an hour driving around we got a clue and a phone connection, and the place we needed was in exactly the opposite direction the satnav took us, nearly a mile from where we first ended up. W3W allows the user to send the location directly to TomTom, our preferred, (and mine as well), mobile navigation system, giving a W3W reference would have saved an hour of frustration trying to find the clients house, which was also set well off the narrow country lane along a hedged drive.
Oh, and thanks to franksinatra for a well written response from a real-world users perspective.
Not sure if I posted on here before I cant remember but im in the fire service and we dont use what3words in outr brigade. but last year I was spotted by a pair of paramedics in their car not on duty and id collapsed at the roadside after I got ill, when they were looking after me they tried to describe the location and the call handler couldn't place it and so they used what 3 words and they turned up at the exact location required, sometimes I wish we used it when trying to locate fires in the woods lol
a vocabulary of 36 words and we use 8 to determine a location? Mostly, we’d only need 10 words and use 6 of them.
That system works for me, but only in GB. (Except only 35 words are used).
Phew!
W3W allows the user to send the location directly to TomTom, our preferred, (and mine as well),
Nice. 2 extra programs to do what Google maps does natively.
Program before you leave and it will guide you to the door.
SMRT post on w3w was enlightening. Basically give us what ever you want. We appreciate that the general public can't give an accurate grid ref but we would rather you used OS locate - as we will change it to a grid ref as that's what is on our maps.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=4013130385391090&id=337733089597523
SARLOC ... 999 ?
or Maidenhead Locator.
https://github.com/google/open-location-code
and
https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/
The map you have taken with you they say....
Unlikely . So many folk even on here say maps totally unnecessary
Used it after an issue on Dartmoor and was good not only to give location of patient to the 999 handler, but also the nearest tarmac road point to him.
I saw news related to this on the Register this morning and thought it may be of almost no use to anyone here (the alternative service's tags aren't the sort of things you would want to try saying to your helpful dispatcher). It still appealed to the 9 year old in me though so I though it might do the same for some of you lot.
https://www.fourkingmaps.co.uk/
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/14/sweary_four_word_map/
The map you have taken with you they say….
Unlikely . So many folk even on here say maps totally unnecessary
well it won't be much good if you are looking for a W3W reference on it...
I'm going to insist on Four King Square locations for all future mountain rescue incidents. It will lighten up otherwise grim situations. Awesome
Beaten to the Registers report on a rude four word option for w3w.
I hope this person is using the FourKing map to navigate
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-58229967