Aaron Gow, Communications Manager, talks us through the new Greater Manchester Research Map.
While Greater Manchester might be at the centre of our little piece of the universe, it still surprises me that some people don’t know where in England it is. What can be a little more difficult to visualise is the number and location of all the NHS sites and organisations that GM CLRN supports to carry out health research.
With this in mind, we’ve developed The Greater Manchester Research Map of all our Primary Care Partner Sites, NHS Organisations, NIHR Local Research Networks, and other research facilities in the area.
We’ve started by bringing together information from all organisations into one place so anyone who we work with or is interested can see it.
If you’ve used a Google Map before it should be quite intuitive to use but if not there is a brief ‘how to’ guide at the bottom. Currently the categories are searchable by:
- GM CLRN Primary Care Partner Sites – these are our GP partners who receive funding from us to carry out research within Primary Care
- NHS Organisations – these are all our Partner Trusts that we work with. We had tried to separate this into types of organisations, such as Acute Trusts, Mental Health Trusts, etc but the types of care NHS Trusts provide is changing and it makes it difficult to categorise in this way
- NIHR Local Research Network – these are the head offices of the various local research networks in Greater Manchester.
- Research facility – these are a number of other research facilities in Greater Manchester
The map is very much in its first stages and we have ideas about how we would like to develop it and already had people asking for similar for their organisations. We also want to hear your feedback about the information we currently display and what you would like to see in the future. Feel free to post in the comments section below.
How it works
Clicking on the tabs just above the map will show only places in that category, or a selection if you’ve clicked more than one tab. You can toggle the categories by clicking more than once. If you click the ‘All’ tab it will show all the markers from all the categories.
Clicking directly on any of the markers will bring up more details about that site .
To the right of the map is a scrollable list of the various sites. If you click on any of the tabs it will bring up more information on that organisation. You can also zoom in and out of the map with the scale tool on the left of the map or move the map around by left-clicking on the map (away from one of the places ‘pins’).
