Hi all, Kelly here from Community Action Network in Dorset. As a county with several bordering LA’s (most of which do not yet have a ORUK compliant directory), we are experiencing an increased interest in frontline workers wishing to access our Service Finder for residents living just off the borders of Dorset.
At the moment, we categorise our services based on eligibility in specific neighbourhoods, therefore if I was to type in a postcode which is not in one of those neighbourhoods, nil results would be returned.
Has anyone else had experience of this and how we could restructure the data in some way so that we can still list options for people “out of area”?
Tagging @iansingo from Digital CoProduction
And @ChrisSmall who will be taking my place in managing this project at the end of this month!
Many thanks,
Kelly
Hi Kelly,
The issue that I think you are describing is down to the scope of neighbourhoods you are making available for the service provider to indicate their service coverage.
At the back end, the service coverage (eligibility) is created by recording the neighbourhoods that any persons living in are entitled to access the service. These neighbourhoods are defined by a polygon which equates to a set of post codes.
At the front end, the software captures a post code from the user and then compares it to post codes that define the neighbourhoods. If the Post code does not match then a service is not returned but of course if you enter a post code which is outside of your set of neighbourhoods then it will never match so you will get a nil return.
The answer is to include the neighbourhoods in the back-end that you are prepared to accept a post code from at the front. This should then be the scope of your software geography. In other words, you perhaps want all neighbourhoods within Dorset included.
I realise this sounds complicated so happy to have a phone chat to explain.
Cheers
Ian