Case Study: Scottish Fire and Rescue Service accelerates emergency response with Idox virtual street segments

Creating easily identifiable sections of Scotland’s rapid transit routes to drive quicker deployment of fire crews

Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS), one of the world’s largest fire and rescue services, needed a way to accurately identify stretches of Scotland’s vast highway network between junctions and in both directions of travel. With three control hubs running separate mobilising systems, SFRS lacked a consistent way to share these location sections across systems, making it harder to quickly pinpoint and dispatch the nearest crews to incidents. Idox supported the organisation using its Bluelight gazetteer (Aligned Assets platform) and address data solutions.

Idox helped SFRS create virtual street segments in the gazetteer, giving each rapid transit route section a consistent name and SFRS code that could be shared across all three control hubs. This enabled faster mobilisation of the nearest appliances, improved consistency ahead of a future single mobilising system, and strengthened reporting by centralising the data. While the case study does not give numeric KPIs, SFRS says the approach helps get crews to incidents quicker and identify accident hotspots for better appliance planning.

Scottish Fire and Rescue Service

Lynn Oliver

Gazetteer Watch Commander