In Association with Hospedia, Vectis Radio is now available free of charge to patients at St Mary’s Hospital on their bedside entertainment system.
Patients at the Island’s hospital can tune into the Community Radio Station on Channel 5 of their bedside units.
Station director Kelvin Currie said:
“It is Vectis Radio’s remit to bring community radio to the widest possible audience within its service area. It is not always possible for patients in hospital to pick up our FM broadcasts and we approached Hospedia who were very helpful and set us up on Channel 5. We can now help patients at St Mary’s to be entertained and keep in touch.”
Vanessa Flower, Head of Quality Governance at IOW NHS Trust said:
NHS led research has found that listening to music before, during and after an operation can help reduce pain. We are pleased that we can offer entertainment for patients at their bedside and that there is now a greater choice of radio stations to listen to, so we can cater for wider musical tastes.”
Hospedia is the UK’s leading operator of patient entertainment and engagement systems. Its TV, telephony and WiFi solutions are used in over 130 hospitals across the NHS, helping patients stay in touch with friends and family while in hospital.
I don’t know where to start with this! Hospedia are absolutely useless, they only have a couple of TV channels and 4 radio stations and have the gall to charge people £10 a day to use the service! Most of the time the screens don’t work, the phones cost extra and forget about trying to get on the internet (they don’t work!) and I challenge anyone to try and get a refund from them.
I would also like to point out that the picture in this story is NOT a Hospedia screen, I have no idea what this picture is but it is not in St Mary’s.
I would like to read the research that this Vanessa Flower talks of, while I don’t doubt that there is some truth to it, I think that spending a bit more on some extra staff would be a better use of NHS time and money and benefit the patients to a greater degree than some local Tony Blackburn wannabe!
There is no charge for listening to the radio. Nor for outgoing phone calls apart from those to premium rate numbers.
The picture is definitely of a Hospedia screen; the illustration was supplied by Hospedia as part of the press release, and is also on their website. I infer that St Mary’s is furnished with Hospedia units of an earlier model.
I don’t know to which particular research Ms Flower alluded, but I’ve seen similar research showing that people suffer less from pain to a surprising degree when listening to their favourite music; this is unsurprising given that most people can relax with music. I believe if music listening were to be encouraged, perhaps prescribed, there would be more positive outcomes in recovery, less anxious patents, and maybe lower expenditure of pain-killing drugs. I am confident that retuning radio channel 5 incurred no cost to the NHS nor any extra time, and if the island’s community radio station isn’t to a patient’s taste, the system theoretically offers at least four others.
Yes but how much will the patients have to pay per hour, I don’t see that listed there.
Stated pretty clearly in the first paragraph, IMHO.
Every little helps so they say…..