Patients receiving care at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre NHS Foundation Trust are benefiting from a modern patient entertainment system that is providing important comfort during long hospital stays and helping to inform people about their care, whilst alleviating pressure on busy wards.
The trust has worked with Airwave Healthcare to deploy the MyCareTV service, along with 150 intuitive screens in patient rooms across the trust’s Liverpool in-patient hospital.
It means that patients, who can be away from their friends and families for extended periods of time as they receive care, can access content to help keep them stimulated during their recovery, helping to improve their experience.
Emma Daley, the trust’s chief nursing information officer, said: “As the chief nursing information officer at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, I am delighted with the positive impact of MyCareTV for our patients. This system keeps patients informed and entertained, enhancing their overall experience. It provides crucial comfort and normalisation during a potentially isolated long stay in hospital, supporting mental and physical well-being, and allows our nursing teams to focus more on direct patient care. We look forward to continuing to innovate and enhance the patient experience at our trust.”
The MyCareTV service provides a new platform for the trust to host digitised information often held in printed leaflets, allowing patients to use screens in their rooms to access materials relating to their condition, care, and recovery.
Mindfulness content created by trust teams and provided by Airwave’s sister company TechLive, is also made available for patients, as well as condition-specific related videos that demonstrate relevant exercises and other insights that can help patients to better manage their care. Patients can also choose to cast media from their own devices.
David Croft, technical change manager at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, said: “We are only at the beginning of what’s possible through MyCareTV and what we can achieve for patients and busy staff. Already our patients tell us they are better entertained, with access to media content they would have in their homes, providing additional comfort for many who may be experiencing challenging treatment pathways and spending significant periods of time in hospital.
“The platform is very stable, user-friendly, and fully supported – and configurable options mean we can now explore ways to use the platform to integrate with other trust systems, and respond to appetite from our staff to better field patient requests to the right person, and release time for busy nursing teams.”
Provided as a fully managed service, the reliable service significantly reduces risk of downtime, and already means that nurses are no longer spending time logging requests for trust teams to repair televisions.
In-room screens can also be used to gather patient feedback on their care, whilst anticipated reductions in leaflet usage are expected to support sustainability initiatives.
Airwave Healthcare will also be providing patients for the first time with access through MyCareTV to live streaming of music events across a broad range of genres, including orchestral recitals, rock concerts and music festivals. The service launch is imminent and for some events patients will have the option of interacting with the event via an app.
Dean Moody, healthcare services director at Airwave Healthcare, said: “The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre has made a proactive decision to innovate with patient entertainment technology in ways that add value to the patient experience, that help to stimulate minds as people receive care, and that can make a tangible difference to staff. We are really pleased to see this already working well, and we look forward to collaborating with a very forward-looking team at the trust, to enable even more benefits to be realised to help to enable efficiencies in the care environment.”
