Firstly, I realise this blog hasn’t been updated as often as I would like, what with my new job and moving house 3 times in 2 weeks I have been somewhat stretched…
Anyway, today I received some very exciting news! But first some background.
After the interactivism hackday I attended a while ago, team NHS TimeTag got together and had a rethink through our idea. Eventually we ended with a slightly different take on the original idea of NHS waiting times in clinics. We have instead decided to target the waiting times in NHS emergency departments. We aim to do this initially using an online service, with a freely available API which could eventually support a mobile app.
The first thing you will be thinking will undoubtedly be the thing which also came into my head during the brainstorming session which was “The last thing on your mind in an emergency will be to check the internet…” Totally true, but that’s not the situation our idea is targeted at.
Instead, imagine you sustain an injury such as a sprained ankle, but decide to sleep on it and see if it gets better overnight on its own (like all good manly men do…). In the morning your foot resembles a footBALL and you decide that regardless of how manly you may feel, for the good of your health you should probably go to A&E and get it seen to.
Enter our interactivism project. Enabling you to locate the nearest and/or least busy A&E department. The benefits of this are twofold:
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You get seen faster and more efficiently, meaning you’re happy and your foot stops doing an admirable impression of a basketball.
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A&E departments don’t get overrun with people all coming to them when there might be a perfectly good empty clinic down the road who could deal with your injury, thus relieving the pressure on them.
Now you know all about what we have planned, I am literally bouncing up and down to say: WE WON AN INTERACTIVISM AWARD! So excited, proud of our team and ridiculously eager to get started! Other than the above rough outline, I’m not going to go into specifics yet, we need to meet up as a team for beer and celebrations and eventually maybe even some planning… Needless to say watch this space!
