Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership is launching an online campaign to raise awareness of ‘What3Words’ in a bid to get more residents in Warwickshire to use the app to provide emergency services with the location of a collision or emergency situation.

What3Words is a simple yet powerful app that has divided the world into 3-meter-squares and given each square a unique combination of three words – its What3Words address –  for example Silver.Label.Smile will take you to a precise 3-meter-square within Warwick Castle.  

If a collision or emergency situation occurs, callers can give the call handler the three words and this will help dispatch emergency services to their precise location. This is even more important in rural locations where it’s difficult to communicate a location accurately.

The app gives the caller a simple way to describe precisely where help is needed, enabling responders to find and get resources to the scene as quickly as possible.  It is hoped that this simple change, could help save more lives and reduce the seriousness of some injuries due to patients receiving treatment more quickly.

The partnership is raising awareness of the app through a week-long campaign starting on 01 November. Each day, local landmarks and beauty spots along with their What3Words address will be posted on the partnership social media on @WarwickshireRoadSafety (Facebook) and @WarksRoadSafety (Twitter) using the hashtag #What3Words. 

Residents will be asked to comment if they know the local landmark or look the words up on the app to find the location.      

The What3Words system works offline, making it ideal for use in areas with an unreliable data connection. What3Words addresses cover the entire world and can be used in over 40 languages. 

Cllr Wallace Redford, Warwickshire County Council Portfolio Holder for Transport and Planning, said: “We sincerely hope that this online campaign will help to raise awareness and encourage residents to download the What3Words app and encourage their friends and family to do the same. 

“When responding to incidents, the emergency services can sometimes spend critical time and resources working to locate people in need of help.  Whilst this does not generally stop help arriving, for some patients, What3Words could be the difference between life and death.”

Chair of Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership and Police and Crime Commissioner, Philip Seccombe, said  “We are asking the public to use What3Words to provide the location of a collision when calling the emergency services as we hope this could help save more lives and reduce the seriousness of some injuries, ultimately giving those involved in collisions a better future. 

“This is just one of many initiatives being developed by Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership to help achieve our target of a 50% reduction in those killed or seriously injured on our roads by 2030.”  

The What3Words campaign is part of the work of the Post Collision Working Group which works alongside four other working groups – Safe Vehicles, Safe Roads, Safe Road Users, and Safe Speeds – to focus on the Safe System approach to road safety. The working groups were set up by Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership when the partnership adopted its Strategy to 2030 in February 2022.  

To read more about the Road Safety Partnership strategy and safe systems approach please visit the website. https://warksroadsafety.org/our-strategy/  

Please help to reach as many people as possible by sharing messages about What3Words from the Partnership’s social media accounts on Twitter @WarksRoadSafety and Facebook @WarwickshireRoadSafety