From friend at the bedside to health adviser to all: how hospital radio’s ambitions are expanding

Cheers patients up

A friend at the bedside has long described as hospital radio’s primary goal. “It can be a real benefit for patients who don't have many visitors,” says Sam Smette, chair of trustees at the Hospital Broadcasting Association. “It's the personal, emotional connection between the patient and the volunteer that hopefully cheers patients up and makes their day a little bit better.”

Some stations even broadcast direct from the wards. Radio Cherwell in Oxford’s live children's show has volunteers playing games and giving out prizes at the bedside—“the best Saturday morning fun ever,” says Ian Pinnell, vice chair of Hospital Broadcasting Association’s trustees and long time volunteer at the station. On another live quiz show for adults, different hospital sites compete: “Ward visitors with microphones are team captains for the patients. It can turn into quite a battle.”

A 2016 review commissioned by the Hospital Broadcasting Association, which is due to be updated next year, concluded that hospital radio might help to counter boredom, loneliness, anxiousness, disorientation, and depersonalisation in hospital by providing patients with entertainment, social interaction, a sense of belonging, and by enabling their stories and preferences to be heard.1 Health and wellbeing information could also usefully be shared, it suggested, and volunteers report benefits too. Meeting hospital patients’ psychosocial needs may also help to reduce stays and save costs.23

Public health information

In 2020, when the covid-19 pandemic restrictions kicked in, health secretary Matt Hancock told the Commons, “Hospital radio is always important, but. . .when visitors have not been able to go into hospitals, it is even more important.” Many presenters and volunteers bought their own equipment to broadcast from home. Prince Charles and singer James Blunt hosted dedicated shows.

The stations also provided ready-made ways for trusts to disseminate official public health information and the latest restrictions to patients. Public health messaging persists; for example, Radio Horton has recently featured the blood pressure campaign Know your numbers!, and Stoptober, to encourage smoking cessation during the month of October.

The Hospital Broadcasting Association offers its member stations programmes including Health Today, in which former BBC reporter Dominic Arkwright chats with experts and celebrities about health topics. The Word on Health for 21 years has offered bitesize wisdom on topics like mental health, vaccination, screening programmes, and infection control. 10 Today encourages older people to stay active through 10 minute movement and stretching classes. Individual stations also produce their own health and wellbeing content, and may broadcast announcements from the trust and charities such as Age UK.

Smette, who presents a weekly show at Radio Horton in Banbury, says stations are increasingly exploring programming that engages staff, who are “there all the time.” Radio Horton has covered the trust’s staff recognition awards, for example.4

Football commentary

UK hospital radio began at York Hospital in the 1920s, the Hospital Broadcasting Association says. Early motivation was to provide football commentary to patients who couldn't get to matches. Although hospital stations are dotted around the world, “it's very much a UK thing,” says Pinnell. Hospital Broadcasting Association has helped stations launching in France and the Netherlands and had inquiries from hospitals in Australia, Brazil, and the US.

The UK stations sustain their services through funding from sponsorship and by hosting events in the community, which also raises awareness of their work and helps to recruit volunteers. Patients who experience radio ward volunteers may decide to volunteer once recovered “to give something back,” he says.

Veronica Bromhead volunteers for Radio Horton in her retirement, helping patients set up their radios and headphones and taking their requests. Aged 15, she was in hospital with a ruptured appendix. “I was really poorly. A radio volunteer like me asked if I wanted a record played.” Bromhead asked for The Bay City Rollers’ song I only want to be with you to be played. “They played it, and it cheered me up no end.” She jumped at the chance to pay back the good turn. “I remembered how I felt. When you're in hospital it can be long days and nights. If you can't sleep, our station is on 24 hours a day,” she says. “It gives patients and staff such a boost. If it makes just one person's day, I've done my job.”

Simon Tidmarsh is a presenter on Coventry Hospital Radio; by day, he works in the hospital’s quality department. The hyper-local focus explains hospital radio’s popularity, he says. He started volunteering in 2011, as a way into the radio industry. Presenters including Jeremy Vine, Phillipa Forrester, and Jacqui Oatley trod this path. Andrew Peach, a BBC news and current affairs presenter, says volunteering at BHBN hospital radio in Birmingham early in his career “taught me the most important thing about radio: it is all about the listener.”

Promoting health and wellbeing

Despite the ubiquity of smartphones and music streaming services today, and a decline in the number of stations over recent decades, hospital radio is reinventing itself, with the covid-19 pandemic emphasising its value. Some trusts don’t recognise hospital radio’s value to patients and staff, and when stations close it’s “really sad and hard for us,” says Smette.

“It’s as important today as when it first started,” says Pinnell. “It’s morphing into a broader service to promote health and wellbeing.” Smette thinks this “could help reduce strain on the NHS, by sharing health and wellbeing content and raising awareness of activities in the local community that can help improve mental or physical health.”

By broadcasting beyond the wards to the public, hospital radio can reach increasing numbers of patients in community care or on virtual wards, as well as recently discharged hospital inpatients who could benefit from the connection and health focused messaging, the Hospital Broadcasting Association’s review concluded.

GP Wilson would like to offer listeners more clinical information. “It's just a matter of fitting it in.” In relation to hospital radio and volunteering, she says, “Support it. It’s a really good service for patients. And it's a really rewarding thing to do.”