RescueCentre is a personal project of mine and to be honest, I think it’s great.

Let me tell you a bit about how it started…

My name is Dan, I’m a UK NHS paramedic by profession and bat rehabber in West Yorkshire. When I came into bat care I came at it from a human health professional point of view, which would help me with some of my assessment and triage of my rescues.

I realised that everyone was using sheets of paper, post-it notes, scraps and notebooks. If people were using digital tools, it was often excel. There had to be a better way.

Thinking about my work in the NHS and how we had moved from paper to electronic based patient recording, I wondered why we couldn’t do this for the bats I was caring for. So I tinkered and tinkered for a while but nothing I did was really working out. Then I enlisted the help of Luke who really pushed my cluster of ideas into its very first iteration.

I had also made the decision that my new system shouldn’t be just for bats and that I wanted to make sure others could also use it. I learned the codebase that Luke had set up and started to tweak a few things. Before I knew it, it had been expanded and I had started to build links with other rescues who were also looking at a system for care.

The user base increased and we had an active Facebook group giving feedback and suggestions on a regular basis. Before I knew it, I had made more and more developments to the system to meet the needs of the users that were signing up.

Fast forward a couple of years and we now have a dedicated user base and some of the suggestions were becoming difficult to add into the system that had been built and bolted on bit by bit over the years. At this point I made the decision to start a new, from the ground up, system and build all those wonderful suggestions in, right from the start.