The History of PHR
On 10th December 1967 the first hospital broadcast was made to patients of Paddington General Hospital. Using a tape recorder and a microphone, a small group of volunteers would visit the patients in the wards to collect requests, tape record the music at home and then return to the hospital to introduce the requests and play back the tapes for two hours on Sundays.
This was an experiment to see if hospital radio would be popular with patients and staff - well it was and programmes were soon being heard daily from a studio paid for by the League of Friends of what was by then known as St. Mary's Hospital Harrow Road.
In 1972, two more hospitals were linked up with the service, the Samaritan Hospital for Women and the Western Eye Hospital, both in Marylebone Road. Connection to St. Mary's Paddington came soon afterwards, with programmes also available at Paddington Green Children's Hospital, St. Charles' Hospital in Ladbroke Grove and Paddington Community Hospital - for a while, a total of seven hospitals.
The Harrow Road hospital closed in 1988 and, because there wasn't enough room on the main hospital site, we were relocated just around the corner from St. Mary's in Paddington into a nurses' residence. The Health Authority and the Special Trustees of St. Mary's Hospital contributed to the cost of converting parts of a derelict basement for our use.
So that is where we are today, but the nurses' home is no longer part of the NHS - it is now owned and managed by a housing trust and our part of it is leased back to St. Mary's. Hospital staff still live above us and we share our entrance with a GP surgery that also leases space in the building. Access to our studio is not available to all as we are in a basement and there is no lift. It is also inaccessible to patients because we are a few minutes walk from the hospital and relatively difficult to find!
In 2002, with massive help from medical students from Imperial College School of Medicine, our studio was brought bang up to date with the purchase of a computerised audio storage system that is able to pump out the music our patients want to hear 24 hours a day.
When we first started, the BBC had just introduced Radio's 1,2,3 and 4. Our name was originally "Radio 5", twenty-odd years later, the BBC introduced their own Radio 5 and at a time when we were broadcasting to hospitals in what was called "Parkside Health Authority". We took that name and adopted the health authority's corporate logo style too and made our name "Parkside Hospital Radio".... With successive reorganisations in the NHS, Parkside Health Authority has long since gone away and we are still here! For a few years we broadcast to patients of two different NHS Trusts - St. Mary's NHS Trust, and Parkside Health NHS Trust, the latter provided community hospitals across a wide area of London until reorganisation in 2002.
We now use Paddington's Hospital Radio as our name.
Plans for major redevlopment on the St. Mary's site in Paddington have now been dropped and St. Mary's will become part of the UK's first Academic Health Science Centre.
The Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust and St Mary's NHS Trust merged on 1 October 2007 and integrate with Imperial College London. The result, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust forms the foundation for the AHSC, and will be the largest NHS Trust in the UK.
Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust and St Mary's NHS Trust were recently rated the second and third best hospitals in the country for clinical performance, quality of care and safety. [Dr Foster Good Hospital Guide 2006 - How healthy is your hospital (April 2007)].
Imperial College is one of Europe's largest medical research institutions and was recently ranked fourth in the world for biomedical research [ The Times Higher Education Supplement 2006 world university rankings].
