Working collaboratively at a time of national emergency
In January, no-one could have foreseen how quickly Covid-19 would spread around the world. And no-one could have anticipated the lockdown and other unprecedented measures that the Irish Government would need to introduce urgently to help save lives in Ireland. Yet, Ordnance Survey Ireland was ready nonetheless, writes Hugh Mangan, General Manager, Business and Marketing at OSi.
Over recent years, OSi has made significant investments in creating a national geospatial data hub for Ireland, in building collaborative relationships and in implementing strong data governance. This meant that when the threat of a global pandemic began to emerge, OSi had the technology platform, the partnerships and the processes already in place to support the government’s response to the looming national emergency.
From the very outset of the crisis, senior Government officials, senior medical officers, national health emergency teams and local authorities all started asking the same questions: how many cases of Covid-19 are there in Ireland and, critically, where are they? Everyone needed answers quickly because huge decisions needed to be made about introducing a lockdown, closing businesses and preparing healthcare organisations for a possible surge in patients. It was therefore clear, from the very beginning, that statistical and geospatial data would have a critical role to play in the national response to Covid-19 in Ireland.
Responding rapidly in a national emergency
OSi was able to respond rapidly to the emerging health crisis because it didn’t need to create anything new. More than four years earlier, the organisation had launched GeoHive, a spatial data infrastructure comprising people, process and technology. Highlighted in Ireland’s Public Sector Data Strategy as Ireland’s geospatial data hub, GeoHive provided a ready-made, proven and highly versatile platform for sharing geospatial and related data in Ireland.
OSi also already had a strong working relationship with Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO), underpinned by an official memorandum of understanding. The strength of the partnership between OSi and CSO is unusual across Europe but proved highly advantageous.
OSi and CSO had been working together for more than two years to build Ireland’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) data hub for monitoring progress towards achieving the United Nations SDG goals. As a result of this ongoing initiative, the two organisations had strong experience of working collaboratively and had the right people and processes in place to ensure strong data governance. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) data hub is built using software supplied by Esri Ireland, a commercial organisation that supplies the geographic information system (GIS) technology upon which GeoHive is built.
When Covid-19 began to emerge as a very real threat to life in Ireland, the SDG group extended its focus to include Covid-19 and built new capabilities on GeoHive to address the challenges of the pandemic. At the same time, the group expanded to include: the All-Ireland Research Observatory (AIRO), based at Maynooth University, for data handling and spatial analysis; and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage (DHLGH), OSi’s parent department and a key player in the local authority space.
This new group, called the GeoHive Covid-19 Response Coordination Group, was set up within days with the vision to provide key data and tools to inform Ireland’s operational intelligence and situational awareness efforts in response to the Covid-19 outbreak. A collaboration between public and private sector organisations, led by the public sector, the group had a formally defined purpose and was guided by the mantra “collect once; use many times”. It wanted to ensure that data pertinent to the health crisis was collected once and shared effectively via GeoHive where appropriate, so that different government departments didn’t waste time and resources duplicating effort on data collection, data management and analysis by the CSO played the key role in data governance and oversight.
Delivering timely data to inform critical decisions
The GeoHive Covid-19 Response Coordination Group hit the ground running, driven by the enthusiasm of everyone involved, all of whom understood the critical importance of the work they were doing and believed it would make a difference to Ireland’s ability to defend itself against the coronavirus. The group began to collect Covid-19 data from a variety of official sources and built a range of interactive dashboards and web apps on GeoHive for presenting the data via a variety of secure, public and private data hubs, recognising that different groups of people needed to see different data sets in different ways. The first GeoHive data hub was launched on 18 March, a week before the government closed almost all businesses, venues and public amenities and nine days before the full lockdown began. It provided everyone with a visual overview of the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 and deaths in the country and was updated daily. In less than four months, it received over 750,000 hits during March to June and 650,000 hits on mobile devices.
The publicly accessible Covid-19 data hub was swiftly followed by the launch of a similar dashboard specifically for the National Public Health Emergency Team, Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer and other senior decision makers. This more expansive dashboard provided over 100 National Public Health Emergency Team key personnel with daily updates on a wide range of indicators, including the capacity in intensive care units around the country, giving them the daily insight they needed to inform critical decisions throughout the crisis.
Over time, there was an increasing desire for Covid-19 information on a timely basis and the Department of Health (DoH) chaired a collaborative Covid data co-ordination group which included representatives from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC), Health Service Executive (HSE), Health Intelligence Unit (HIU), CSO, OSi and Maynooth University (MU) to agree for geographic dissemination of Covid-19 incidence in Ireland and release more data to the general public. The group developed a new public GeoHive site, giving users the option to explore the data, as open data, for the first time. This public Covid hub shows the cumulative number of cases and deaths to date, on a geographic basis, by local electoral divisions along with a range of other data and visualisations and has received over 100 million views since its launch.
Throughout the lockdown, local authorities in Ireland were responsible for engaging with voluntary organisations and coordinating support in the community, particularly for vulnerable members of society who were shielding or self-isolating at home. The GeoHive Covid-19 Response Coordination Group stepped forward to support local authorities and used GeoHive once again as a platform for recording data, such as how many calls the local authority received and how many related to concerns about social isolation or the meals service. Updated daily, this public and secure dashboard covered all local authorities in the country, allowing the DHPLG to monitor the level of support being delivered in communities all around the country.
“The public Covid hub shows the cumulative number of cases and deaths to date, on a geographic basis, by local electoral divisions along with a range of other data and visualisations and has received over
100 million views since its launch.”
When the Taoiseach’s office started planning for reopening the economy, the GeoHive Covid-19 Response Coordination Group created a report and a dashboard showing the locations of retail units, their type, size and number of employees. The group was able to deliver far more detailed intelligence than government officials had thought possible – and did so within a short timescale. This insight then informed the government’s ‘Economic Considerations for Reinstating Economic Activity’ report and helped to reassure the Taoiseach’s office about the declining risks associated with reopening retail businesses earlier than initially planned.
There are many other examples too of data hubs, dashboards, reports and analysis that the GeoHive Covid-19 Response Coordination Group was able to deliver, at speed, to meet a specific requirement during the crisis. In one project, the group created a data hub showing the average width of footpaths to help town planners at local councils identify where social distancing measures would be hard to apply, particularly around busy retail locations. In another project the group created a dashboard for the Garda to help it monitor traffic mobility and journey trends during lockdown. An Garda Síochána could then make better informed decisions about where to set up roadside checks, to make sure people travelling were undertaking essential journeys during lockdown. In each of these cases, and the other projects described above, GeoHive delivered the data that people needed, in a format that they could understand, enabling them to make the best possible decisions at an incredibly challenging time.
Standing prepared for whatever happens next
When we look back in months to come, there will doubtless be many lessons that we can learn, as a country, from our experiences with Covid-19. However, we can already appreciate the key role that geospatial data and apps have played in keeping people informed about a fast-changing situation, revealing epidemiology patterns and giving people the information they need to make confident, though difficult, decisions. In many respects, this health crisis has validated the investment in GeoHive, proving to OSi, the Government and our partners that it is indeed the authoritative, standardised public sector data collaboration platform that the country needs.
Looking ahead, Ireland can now feel certain that OSi, their public sector colleagues and private sector partners have a proven platform, well-established processes and the strong working relationships to respond to as yet unforeseeable emergencies. Whatever challenges Ireland’s government may face in the months and years ahead, it is reassuring to know that OSi was ready when it mattered most and will be ready again for whatever happens next.
Ordnance Survey Ireland
Phoenix Park, Dublin 8
Eircode D08 F6E4
T: +353-1-802-5300
E: customer.services@osi.ie
