Press Clipping

Irish Times - A Heroic Invention

Thursday, 22nd September 2011

Transcript

Source: Irish Times

Robin Blandford’s background as a digital-media engineer and his experience as a rescue climber led him to devise Decisions for Heroes, a system that records and analyses rescue operations, enabling rescue teams to spot trends and be better prepared to react to emergencies.

BETTER INFORMATION makes for better decisions. And in the emergency services better decisions can save lives. This was the initial motivation for Robin Blandford to found Decisions for Heroes back in 2008.
"I was working as a volunteer coastguard in sea-cliff rescue at the time and was involved in coastline searches and so on," he recalls. "I started looking at the tools that were available to us locally to
assist us in our work, as well as what was happening internationally, and I saw a niche there."

That niche was a collaborative rescue-team management database that helps record and analyse rescue operations. "I developed the database for my own team at the beginning, and I gave it to a few others. I was quickly able to leave a job I had taken with Reuters and come home to establish Decisions for Heroes." Blandford’s background as a digital- media engineer, combined with his experience as a volunteer rescue climber, gave him the technical expertise and insights into the needs of rescue teams to develop a tool that would help them make the best decision in emergency
situations.

Decisions for Heroes enables rescue workers to record and analyse rescue operations around the country so that they can spot patterns and trends in the incidents that they
respond to, and provide the most appropriate prevention and intervention.

The web-based application helps rescue teams collate data about all their members, training, incidents, equipment, and casualties. Analysing this information allows them to not only optimise their response and improve their training quality but also to observe patterns and trends in localities to create, measure, and implement focused accident and suicide-prevention campaigns.

"The system might identify a cluster of incidents in a particular area," he says. "When that happens a team can train for rescues on that type of terrain and work on evacuation methods for different weather conditions in the area. For example, a helicopter might not be available in certain conditions, so the team will have to have the equipment and the training for an alternative means of evacuation."
Suicide is another issue with which the system can help. "If there has been a cluster of suicides or suicide attempts in a particular location the authorities can be notified and signage can be put up alerting people of numbers to call and so on."

This has already had a significant impact in the Dublin area. Based on information recorded at Howth Head over the course of a year, a pattern in the times and locations of suicide attempts was identified. Using this data, the local coastguard was able to apply preventive measures and significantly reduce the number of suicides.
There are three main elements to the system. The first relates to optimising the team. "We perform automatic analysis of incidents to look for patterns and trends in your response times, injuries encountered, casualty demographics, with hotspot cluster mapping to identify areas at higher risk," says Blandford.
The system also tracks and records qualifications and exercises, and receives alerts when these qualifications are set to expire. The third element is equipment tracking. Teams can quickly log rescue equipment usage against incidents and training exercises, monitor supply levels and receive email alerts when equipment is due for service or replacement, schedule on-call rosters and accident-prevention safety campaigns on a shared calendar and quickly roster personnel for any activity.

The service is offered to commercial companies at the full price, but a discount of 80 per cent is offered to community groups who use the system.
"The business is going well at the moment," says Blandford. "It is in use by rescue teams in seven countries, and we now have a staff of four in Ireland, with reps in the US and Canada as well."

The €100,000 grant from the Arthur Guinness Fund will be used to diversify the system to provide the same tools to other emergency response teams, such as the fire service, both nationally and internationally. "We’re going to use the funding to increase staff numbers and to expand our penetration in other markets. We want to develop new mobile applications so the system can be used offline and away from base as well. We are also going to work on improving the analytics side of it to make it even more useful. We were self-sustaining as a business before we got the Arthur Guinness Fund grant, but we wouldn’t have been able to invest in these areas. It has been very helpful to us."

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