At the core of the Q community is a desire to help members connect and share their experiences of improving the quality of health and care at a UK-wide level. Today we are rolling out the ability for Q members to put themselves on a map, which will make it easier to be seen by others, visualise other members in their local area and show the spread of people in improvement across the UK. In future we will be adding other functionality to the map, such as filtering by professional role and areas of interest.
To add yourself to the map, click the Edit profile link at the top of the webpage (if you don’t see that link you’ll need to log in first). Scroll down to the Map location field, start entering a location and you’ll see a list of suggestions. Pick one of those and click the Save Changes button at the bottom. You can then visit the member map (also available under Directory in the header menu) to see your pin. You can click the pins to show a short summary of members details, and click on their name to see their full profile. Please note that the map is very accurate, so if you’re working from home make sure you choose a more generic location, such as the name of a town, because if you use a full postcode the pin will be on your street.
We have also done some work on the number of areas of interest options on members profiles (which appear in the online directory). The previous list had grown to over 90 unique and specific areas and users had reported to us that they found this overwhelming and difficult to navigate. We have reduced that down to 29 carefully considered terms, largely based on some detailed research that Health Foundation carried out for its own website. For those who have already added their areas of interest, where possible we have mapped these to the new ones. Let us know if you find you can’t place your area of interest within these new broad areas of interest. These new areas of interest won’t restrict the ability to key word search using the search bar in the online directory.