Our first video blog: Drivetimes to A&E departments
Filed in: General News, Health Mapping, Mapping Software, Techie Stuff
May 31, 2012
We were recently taken aback when one of our clients asked us if we do mapping… We thought everyone knew that GIS was our bread and butter but it turns out some of our data clients are unaware that we have our own purpose-built mapping software that specialises in the geography of population and their lifestyles.
It’s a case of not seeing the wood for the trees sometimes. Because our GIS, Prospex, is our oldest product and we know it so well, we assume everyone knows, and loves, it as much as we do! We aim to address this critique with more easily accessible information on our range of mapping software. Starting now…
The first of many things we ought to show is that Prospex draws maps. Here is a map I plan to use in a future posting (of course drawn using Prospex). It shows the time taken for heavy lorries to drive to the Drax power station. (This allows us to begin to identify which farms would be suitable for supplying biomass, such as willow and miscanthus – but we’ll get onto that at a later date).
We have been developing Prospex for some 20 years and as you would expect it has been through several iterations during that time as it is continually improved to meet the evolving needs of our customers.
To showcase some of Prospex’s suite of geographic and demographic tools we’ve decided to do a series of video blogs.
The above video looks at the drive time wizard. Of course us being BD, we wanted to look at a real need and so have defined a catchment showing six local authorities as well as the locations of major hospitals within these LA. Using drive times, we can assess those areas in the region that may have a problem in accessing emergency healthcare, particularly during rush hour traffic!
Posted by Geoff Beacon, Chairman at Beacon Dodsworth.
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