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news
London Ambulance (via Oxyman on Wikimedia Commons under CC BY SA 3.0)Cyclist died after ambulances failed to find Olympic velodrome
Ambulances called to London’s Olympic velodrome at Lee Valley Velopark when a cyclist suffered a heart attack took almost half an hour to get there because of out-of-date satellite navigation software, it has emerged. The victim, a 60-year-old man, died later in hospital.
The incident, which has been the subject of a London Ambulance Service report, happened in August last year, 18 months after the velodrome, built for the London 2012 Olympic Games, reopened.
The man was taking part in a session on the track when he suffered a cardiac arrest, reports the London Evening Standard.
The 60-year-old man went into cardiac arrest in August last year at a track cycling session in Stratford, reports BBC News London.
Dispatchers sent three vehicles - two ambulances and an advanced paramedic - to the scene at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, but their sat-nav software had not been updated to show new roads.
It took them 27 minutes to arrive, compared to a maximum target arrival time when someone’s life is at risk of eight minutes.
Staff at the velodrome provided medical assistance, including using a defibrilator, until LAS personnel reached the scene.
According to the LAS report, the length of time it took personnel to arrive was because of the “E20 Olympic Park not displaying on the sat-nav system.”
The service maintained it had “taken steps to improve knowledge of the area,”
It said: "In response, mapping books were updated detailing the Olympic Park and E20 area and subsequent updates in November 2015 to the Garmin system now detail the area and road network."
The report found that the circumstances constituted a “serious” patient safety incident - one of 62 in 2015, up 41 per cent on the previous year.
LAS’s medical director, Dr Fenella Wrigley, said that its systems had been brought up to date and that details of road changes had been communicated to staff.
“We are very sorry for the delay in reaching the patient,” she added.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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28 comments
This is something that proves our total reliance on tech to do stuff. Last year driving up the A1 I was spat off some 20 miles south of Scotch Corner. Stopping at some workmen it turned out that the diversion pushed me up to Middlesbourgh. A huge diversion. Fortunately out of habit I had a road map in the back and a quick look had me cutting through the hills and only having a 10 mile diversion.
Anyway, while local knowledge may allow regular crews get around speedily. You would think that the ambulance station would have some form of paper backup to assist non local crews in the event of poor updating by Google etc. Especially when they have to get to such a high profile building in response to either a medical or terrorist situation quickly and safely.
I've driven there once, for a race. Not easy, albeit not so hard that I'd expect a 20 minute delay. What certainly doesn't necessarily work is the suggestion by a few people here that you can just see it and drive towards it. For me it was on the wrong side of the dual carriageway and the first couple of exits were wrong and spat you into the middle of a shopping and residential area.
Road signs not much use either.
I'm curious how many of those posting in here have actually driven to the Olympic velodrome. I note a couple have and have pointed out that the roads that link to the Olympic site and within the complex itself are highly confusing and the signs are rare and hard to spot at best. Yes, you can see where you want to get to from a distance but a lot of the roads that seem to go in that direction then veer off somewhere else and you then have to backtrack and try again, several times in some instances.
I've been there many times for training as well as racing but I usually take public transport as it's much easier and I've only driven in the car just the once. Finding the parking area is really hard even when you know roughly where you're supposed to be going. And yep, my satnav couldn't find the parking area either. I remember racing there a couple of years ago and getting confused, then spotting a clubmate and starting following him only to find out that he was following someone else, and none of us actually knew how to get to where we wanted to be.
It is a shame that the emergency crews took so long to get there and that someone died.
Agreeing with Old Ridgeback is not a common habit. So I'm not going to.....but he is right.
Surrounded by the A12 and a mess of new roads Googlemaps was pretty slow to workout the best route. And it's taken a while for that road network to congeal in any case.
I used to live down the road so I know. In fact the area is still being 'developed'.
It does seem mad that this happened, but I can understand it.
This was reported on the BBC website & if anyone had actually read the full article on there, they would have known these were "out of area" ambulance staff who were covering that area due to staff shortages so wouldn't know where to go. The questions that need asking is why were out of area staff needed and why weren't they provided with local maps as back up to Sat Nav if there known Sat Nav deficiencies in the area. Looks like the ambulance staff are being made the scapegoates for poor management planning & decision making.
PS I don't have any connection to the ambulance staff but do know that they have suffered the same cuts as the rest of the public sector & are woefully undermanned.
had a clubmate come down a couple of months ago while we were training at Lee Valley, the ambulance was there within 10 minutes.
great service especially compared to my experience with ambulances in Buckinghamshire!
Them things, with writing on at the side of the road, pointing to where you're looking for - oh yes, that's it: ROAD SIGNS!
Anyone Google Mapped this place? I used to work around there and even I never noticed that there aren't any actual roadsigns to any of the venues! There's plenty of 'Tourist' signs showing you the way if you're walking, but these are all set back from the road and about as much use as a chocolate teapot when trying to view from a moving vehicle.
Unless you're looking for the shopping centre car parks or Leytonstone, then you're golden
It's big enough, was Stevie Wonder driving?
Surey the LAS were aware of the velodrome for the Olympics in case of competitor or visitor ilness or the possibility of major incident on site?
They could have asked a taxi driver. What were they doing for 20 minutes?
Trying to find a taxi driver? Taxi drivers get lost round there too, it's not on The Knowledge, it's not on anything except the newest A-Z and it certainly won't be on some 6yr old TomTom.
Unfortunate set of circumstacnes. Learn from it (which they have, by buying new satnav software), move on.
no the "learning" from it is dont teach your staff to rely solely on technology, so that if it goes wrong they have the noggin power to think of a rapidly different solution, which are precisely the qualities human ingenuity brings to problem solving which technology cannot replicate...yet...,but if you slavishly follow a sat nav all the time and rely on it to always be there,then this kind of stuff will always happen.
What would have been your solution then? Use an out of date paper map, which some people here ridiculously seem to be suggesting.
Well, how's about the Mark One Eyeball? Is an Olympic velodrome really that hard to spot? Or, phoning home base and asking someone? Or - as others have said - pulling over and asking someone?
So you're saying that they didn't ask anyone including their colleagues at the call centre for help and that it was within their visual range but they didn't choose to drive towards it?
Where did you get this version of events from?
You know that I wasn't actually suggesting that they didn't phone home... I was just offering alternatives to your argument that since they had an out of date satnav then their only other option was to have used "an out of date paper map which some people here ridiculously seem to be suggesting". Still beggars belief that they had such difficulty finding the Olympic f-ing velodrome, though.
To recap, can you tell us what alternative you've suggested that they may not have used?
OK, let's try again:
I wasn't suggesting that they didn't phone home.
I wasn't suggesting that they didn't ask someone for directions.
I was offering - for the sake of argument - alternatives to what seemed to be your argument that since they had an out of date satnav then their only other option was to have used "an out of date paper map which some people here ridiculously seem to be suggesting".
I also suggested that, ultimately, how hard can it be to spot the Olympic velodrome once you are in the right area.
And I agree with other posters that the problem that this case illustrated is that the ambulance service was depending on on-screen navigation which was not kept up to date, and which led to them failing the heart-attack victim.
Are we clear, now?
So to quote you directly
When asked if you could think of a solution, you couldn't actually think of one that you believe they didn't already try in that situation.
Actually no; not my quote.
Oh that explains a lot. Thought you were the 'ingenuity' guy! My bad
Which is great, not for an internet argument anymore, gonna be a nice weekend!
OK; have a good one
Actually the entire road network round there was a confusing mess while they took away old Olympic infrastructure, built new houses/shops etc, closed/built over some old access roads so, even assuming the same emergency response crews are still in that area, don't assume they'll know it 3 years later!
Doesn't help either that it comes under two different spellings (Lee Valley and Lea Valley) and that "Velopark" is a wider term encompassing the velodrome, the closed circuit, the BMX track and the MTB track, all of which have different access roads and parking points.
But it's not on maps or A-Z! And Google hasn't caught up with it either. Even now, there's a whole host of postcodes round there that are new and an old A-Z (even just a year or so old) may not show the right roads.
No they do not - one front entrance, one car park one access road. If they had got to any this guy may still be alive...
Also - does the velodrome not have defribulators? If not, why not? If so, why not used (or maybe they were)? So many unanswered questions, but the main one is why on earth do ambulances (and police and fire engines) not have a connected sat nav which always updates to ensure they have up to date road layouts... Google maps does a good job of staying updated - surely there is something here to be done - no one should be dying because of out of date software....
"Staff at the velodrome provided medical assistance, including using a defibrilator, until LAS personnel reached the scene."
Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away? Did people suddenly lose the ability to look at a map, or even - as cdamian says - google it?!?
I left London a while ago, but is this the velodrome that you can find on Google Maps with "Velodrome, London, UK" or "Lee Valley VeloPark" ?
87h by bicycle apparently.
Fair enough, the sat-nav wasn't up to date; it took a while for Google Maps to catch up with the 'final' road network in the park too.
But it's not like it was a new housing estate in a village somewhere. It's a nationally important sporting venue holding half a dozen televised elite sporting events a year, on a park where there are half a dozen other major venues and public centres (the Orbit, the Box, etc). You're telling me that there was no ambulance support at any of those for the first three years? There was, I've seen it there myself.
So there's another story here and it should be heard.