PATIENT ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEMS


patients. Staff reported that the ward had become a much calmer place to work. The team at one spinal injury centre, for example, told us about their particular patient experience concerns. Severely injured and disabled patients were faced with significant mobility issues. Patients who were quadriplegic were reliant on hospital staff for everything – including the ability to watch television. Patient and staff feedback suggested that the ability to control the television could make a significant difference – with the potential to provide people receiving care with a form of independence often taken for granted. We were able to work in partnership with the centre, and a specialist technology provider, to develop a system where through the movement of the eye, patients could control


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.


Hospitals can also use the same systems as a means to capture patient feedback – such as the NHS Friends and Families Test. Modern approaches often require media platforms


to integrate with other hospital systems, in ways that can release time for busy nurses – for example providing patients with the means to order their meals, request a glass of water, or find out when they are likely to go home, without needing to ask a question. Many NHS Trusts have been enabling this type of service entirely free of charge to patients. So far my team has worked with some 150 NHS organisations, where in every instance a decision has been made to remove costs for the people receiving care. Although entertainment has been part of every one of those deployments, each has responded differently to differing patient needs.


Dean Moody


As Healthcare Services director at Airwave Healthcare, Dean Moody’s role is as a conduit between the NHS and Airwave’s technical team, helping to design, create, and evolve display-centric patient engagement services. Airwave says he has ‘vast experience in the IT and technology sector’, having spent 20 years working in France, and previously running his own IT support company. He also has many years’ specialist knowledge of working with the NHS in the provision of patient engagement technology, ‘to support the entertaining, informing, and educating both of patients and staff’.


Pushing boundaries for younger patients Healthcare providers regularly bring forward different challenges they need to solve. One conversation centred around helping young people. While now widely possible, at the time the organisation in question was one of the first to explore the idea of streaming content to tablet devices, rather than it being confined to bedside terminals. For some younger patients, being moved away from


the ward – perhaps for an imaging requirement such as an X-ray, might lead to them becoming upset or unsettled. In addition to distress for patients, this had the potential to create challenges for nursing teams. A decision was thus made to enable patients to take their entertainment with them, meaning that they didn’t need to interrupt their favourite programme, and that they were more likely to remain entertained and distracted as they are moved from the ward, and more relaxed as they awaited their diagnostic procedure. Just as younger patients have particular needs,


hospitals have also told us about the benefits of moving to free models of media provision for elderly care wards. In one instance, a hospital had decided to move away from a pay-to-watch TV model, which had been seeing little use by patients on the ward. Nurses fed back that simply being able to ask patients if they want to watch television in itself made a substantial difference to patient satisfaction. It acted as a distraction, and with fewer requests being made of busy nursing teams, they were able to better focus their time on treating and caring for


68 Health Estate Journal January 2025


television channel changes and turn the volume up, down, on, and off. The market for such an approach is limited, but it’s not always about the commercial scalability of every development – it is about meeting the needs of hospitals and their specific patients. That’s part of the ethos companies should take when trying to deliver the best for patient experience.


Listening and co-design in action What is clear is that the appetite for providing patient entertainment systems that are free at the point of care in the NHS is driven by patient need. Whether it’s a single specialist ward, or a major multi-site Trust, that need is about much more than about simply installing televisions, and there is arguably no one single set of NHS needs. Every organisation we speak to has different resourcing, and different patient cohorts, who need to be engaged in different ways. Equally, as needs differ from one hospital to another – so they differ in varying care settings – for example in mental health, where healthcare teams may need the ability to control or restrict certain types of content, to avoid the risk of exacerbating anxieties or distress for people in their care. To stimulate, educate, inform, and entertain patients


effectively, the starting point is listening to specific needs. We need to collaborate, to explore the challenges on wards, and also to shine a light on the art of the possible – some of which might not have been considered by the healthcare provider. Patient input is also key. Many hospitals now choose to deploy such technologies to concept wards, testing them on a limited number of beds, and gaining feedback from patients in order to adjust and refine the system, and define the full deployment. This is about active listening – and designing the solution with the people who will use it, to address their requirements.


Overcoming cost barriers in an age of inequity With healthcare equity now a priority commitment, access to media technology, and the potential it offers for enhancing the care experience, shouldn’t and doesn’t need to be determined on the basis of whether patients can afford to pay. Resources are stretched more than ever in the health service, and it is easy to dismiss investment in such systems as unnecessary, but feedback from both staff


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