Who are we?

We are a registered charity providing a radio service for the patients at Barts And The London Chest Hospital Radio in Bethnal Green, East London. The hospital is part of Barts and the London NHS Trust and has patients from all over the UK. As a charity, we rely upon the hard work of a team of volunteers, and all costs are covered by our fundraising work. We are members of the Hospital Broadcasting Association.

Background

Two former Hospital Radio stations in East London closed and a small team of very experienced volunteers from them got together to set up the first radio station ever at Barts And The London Chest Hospital Radio. We are very grateful for the Trust finding us a room for our studio within the Hospital premises. It took some years and numerous setbacks until we finally went "on air" in April 2010.

How does it work

Barts and Barts And The London Chest Hospital Radio Radio have a full radio studio, on the Hospital premises, where we can play CDs, Vinyl records and mini-discs. We broadcast on FM radio, on a frequency off the normal waveband, on a low power transmitter. We hand every patient their own free portable BARTS AND THE BARTS AND THE LONDON CHEST HOSPITAL RADIO RADIO radio, which can only pick up our programmes, and only works within the stretch of our transmitter within the hospital grounds. We visit our listening patients before every live programme, to have a chat and see if they want to request some music. We then race back to the studio, look through our vast record/CD collection, and put together a live radio programme for the patients to hear soon after. When we're not broadcasting live, recorded programmes are played automatically the rest of the time, 24hours a day. Since we started, we've had some great feedback from patients and hospital staff about how they enjoy our ward visits and programmes.