PATIENT ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEMS
Hospital media ‘making a meaningful difference’
As more and more NHS Trusts refresh ageing entertainment technology, they are also exploring ways to inform, educate, and stimulate patients. So says Dean Moody, Healthcare Services director at Airwave Healthcare, who here explains why momentum is building to enhance patient experience and reduce pressures on busy healthcare professionals.
Tim Kelsey of NHS England, and businesswoman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, Baroness Martha Lane Fox, called for Wi-Fi to be made available free of charge throughout the NHS back in 2015. The vision of NHS England’s then National director for Patients and Information, and the former UK digital champion, was to give patients greater access to digital health apps, self-help tools, and social networks, in ways that could ‘support recovery and promote wellbeing’. It was a bold and positive move for the health service
that now, in 2024, has been widely achieved – at least from a technology standpoint. Free Wi-Fi is available to patients across the NHS estate, but with continuously growing pressures in the health service, and ever evolving patient expectations, enabling access to the internet only goes part way to achieving the goals that sat behind the vision. That is one of the reasons that more and more UK hospitals have been taking a different approach to media services.
Moving away from outdated technology The entertainment services provided on many screens you might find on an arm at the hospital bedside have all too often been the subject of negative publicity. Currently, there are around 40,000 terminals still in place on hospital wards in the UK, that are at best more than a decade old, and indeed many are significantly older. Sometimes charging patients more than £10 per day to watch home television channels, such devices are often barely used on wards, despite a requirement for them to be always powered on. They can be difficult to operate, and do little to serve the needs of patients or the NHS. It’s for these reasons that many Trusts have in the past chosen not to provide patient media services to patients. However, with lengthy agreements coming to an end, a drive to re-think a patient entertainment model that was first introduced a quarter of a century ago has been building momentum within the NHS.
A drive toward patient stimulus technology Trusts now want to do much more than provide basic entertainment services. The opportunity is to stimulate patients in their care. That in part means being able to distract patients and support them in their recovery, with access to the same sorts of media and streaming services that they are used to having at home, but it also means better engaging patients in their care, and supporting a better overall patient experience. The aim is to provide patients with access to digital assets and patient-facing apps that can inform them about their care. Systems should be able to amplify information about the operation a patient has had, or provide further insight and actions that patients can carry out after their procedure in order to optimise their outcomes. Digital tools can help to support patients in their onward care journey – for example allowing them to find and choose care providers for when they leave hospital. Media services can allow patients to do everything from arranging time with the hospital chaplaincy service, to speaking to friends and relatives, to ordering from on-site retailers.
Media services can allow patients to do everything from arranging time with the hospital chaplaincy service, to speaking to friends and relatives, to ordering from on-site retailers. Hospitals can also use the same systems as a means to capture patient feedback.
January 2025 Health Estate Journal 67
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