| About The Service | Former Members | |||
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History The Origins For over 35 years the Hospital Broadcasting Service has been providing a high quality radio service to hospitals in the Glasgow and Paisley areas, bringing music and requests to the bedsides of patients. The Service was originally established by a small and dedicated group of volunteers, who piloted programmes for 12 months in 1969, before, on Christmas Day 1970, beginning daily broadcasting to 8 hospitals within the Glasgow area from their premises in Argyle Street.
During the 70's and 80's work was done to develop existing facilities
and four studios were soon providing programmes to the hospitals. However,
due to lack of maintenance by the property owners of the building where
the organisation was located, in the late 80's many of the studios had
to be withdrawn leaving only one major on-air facility to deliver programmes,
with outside broadcast facilities used for back-up and training. In
these deteriorating conditions it was decided that a move to new premises
must be made or The Hospital Broadcasting Service would be forced to
close down. The Move to Baltic Chambers The move to Baltic Chambers in Wellington Street in August 1993 signified a move to more modern and compact offices and the Service and its volunteers once again began to develop its facilities. By Christmas 1993 a newly constructed On-Air Studio was delivered and was the mainstay of programmes for four years until Studio Two was launched on 20th December 1997, the culmination of three years hard work to raise £20,000 for the equipment. A networked computer system was gradually established and a radio link transmitter installed in 1997, initially from the roof of Baltic Chambers but then transferred to the roof of the Hilton Hotel giving a much improved signal path to the hospitals. Also, in 1999, a grant from the National Lottery Charities Board enabled the Service to purchase a completely new set of Outside Broadcast Equipment.
Whilst some of the original hospitals are no longer on the network due
to either closures or local equipment failures, The Hospital Broadcasting
Service, with its developing facilities and its growing team of volunteers
continues to provide quality programming for hospitals. In recent years
additional sites have been connected, The Royal Alexandra Hospital in
1994, Blawarthill in February 1999 and Drumchapel in April 2000 and The Glasgow
Homoeopathic Hospital in January 2006 making
a total of 6 hospitals currently served. Building upon History - plans for the 21st Century Throughout its history The Hospital Broadcasting Service has striven to fulfil its objective of providing the highest possible quality of therapeutic radio service to patients and, in doing so, made a substantial contribution to the development of Scottish Broadcasting. In March 2001, Radio Clyde presented a commemorative plaque to the Service in recognition of this achievement. The Service now intends to expand upon these achievements. We have in the past few years upgraded both of the broadcast studios and are now enhancing computer based play-out systems that will enable us to more often have the records requested by our listeners, Further development work is also taking place with our Outside Broadcast equipment being upgraded to enable us to have more flexibility on events we can cover both on hospital sites and other community events. In early 2007 we will be
extending the programmes to the brand new West of Scotland Cancer Centre
which is know more commonly as 'The Beatson Hospital'. This 180+
bed hospital will be fully equipped with one of the new patient
entertainment systems that provides high quality stereo sound.
This has meant a challenge to our engineering and fund-raising teams as
we are having to provide stereo broadcasts for the first time in our
history made more complicated by our location in Glasgow city centre. |
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