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2008-04-07T19:50:00.007Z

We have had some good news about our coverage in part of the hospital. It has been extremely poor for some time in Oncology, but we've now discovered the cause of the problem and it has been fixed. So, if you or someone you know is unfortunate enough to be on Mersey or Conway wards in Clatterbridge Hospital, you will now be able to find us on Channel One on the bedside system. Unfortunately, there's still no sign of the all singing, all dancing "Patient Power" broadcast system which has been rolled out across most of Arrowe Park. While we wait await its installation, many apologies for the dated plastic pipe headphones that are in use at the moment. Remember that if you need a fresh pair you can contact us on the internal phone system for a replacement.

Happy New Year

2008-01-13T20:56:00.000Z

Hello and happy new year. It's been a relatively quiet time on air at the station, although behind the scenes there's a lot happening. We are currently looking at developing our relationship with Claire House Children's Hospice, who we don't currently broadcast to. Not only would it widen our audience base, it would also give the youngsters a chance to get involved in radio programming. There are technical and funding issues to overcome, and we need to improve disabled access to the studio, but it would be hugely exciting for the youngsters. As the hospital downsizes due to changes in the delivery of health care, we need to find ways of reaching other potential audiences on the site if we are to secure the future of the station and think about things differently. We've got our AGM next week, and will be asking the membership for their views on the way forward for the station.

Change in the air?

2007-09-24T19:40:00.000Z

Recent and ongoing changes at the hospital have prompted me to re-think our programming. Because most of our volunteer presenters have full time jobs, the vast majority of our live output has traditionally been centred around evenings and weekends. For example, our flagship request show is on a Saturday morning, and the team do a magnificent job. But the hospital is becoming a ghost town at weekends, as more and more patients are sent home. This is for a number of reasons, including speedier treatment. Years ago, if you had a hernia operation you were in for three or four days. Now, the same operation is carried out by keyhole surgery and you're in and out in a day. That's great news for patients as they're back home quicker, and brilliant for the NHS as it saves money which can be reinvested elsewhere. But it means many wards are now closed on Saturday and Sunday. Throw into the mix the government's plans for "Super Surgeries" which will treat patients in their own neighbourhood, and it's clear to see it could all combine to present Radio Clatterbridge with a major challenge in the future. So, we are going to have to find ways of getting to the audience during weekdays, and concentrate more of our efforts on providing live programming when we know there are more patients in the hospital. That will probably mean taking on more volunteers who are free of a weekday, both to present programmes and visit wards collecting requests. I will also be looking at shifting presenters from the weekend to a weekday. And, with the support of the Trust, we need to start broadcasting not just to the wards but also to public areas that we don't currently reach such as the restaurant and the pre-op assessment centre. There is still a large audience there to be entertained and informed, but we can't afford to stand still and do things the way we always have done.

Football - bah humbug!

2007-08-16T20:43:00.000Z

The new football season has arrived - but I am not celebrating. Don't get me wrong, I can cheer along with the best of them, but the midweek European and domestic cup games involving our local sides are a pain in the neck for the Programme Controller at Radio Clatterbridge. Several of our members are season ticket holders at Liverpool and Everton, and when it comes to choosing between attending a big match and doing their programme, Radio Clatterbridge takes a definite back seat! Fortunately, the presenters are pretty good at swapping programmes with their non-football supporting colleagues and tend to sort out the gaps in the schedule among themselves. However, I am one of the few people who cheers when Liverpool or Everton exit a cup competition! Champions of Europe? Bah humbug!

Radio Clatterbridge is back on the air!

2007-06-27T20:19:00.000Z

It has taken over three months, but today we finally went back on the air. As is often the case, the engineers still don't exactly know what was wrong. However, they have done a lot of re-wiring and re-routing of cable and a quick check of the wards this evening has revealed that we are once again transmitting to the hospital.

Now comes the job of pulling in an audience again, and our request team will be hitting the wards in the next few days to plug the fact we are back and distribute new leaflets with our programme schedule on.

I did fear that we would lose several of our 30 or so volunteer presenters as a result of being off the air for so long, but that doesn't seem to be the case. A number of them have already called me to tell me they are chomping at the bit to get back on air, and have expressed relief that the wait is over. There is a wonderful loyalty that exists among the Radio Clatterbridge team, and it makes my job a lot easier.

I must say thank you to long-standing member Vic Charles for his assistance and persistence over the last few months in reminding the engineers of the need to sort the fault out, and also to the League of Friends who had expressed concern to the Trust about our situation. The League have been great supporters of Radio Clatterbridge for many, many years and we have been given an awful lot of assistance by Philip Owen and his team. Thanks also must go to Wirral Hospital Trust Chief Executive Len Richards who put one of his engineers on the case with an instruction not to do any other work until we were re-connected!

Normal service has resumed.

Sore feet!

2007-05-21T10:58:00.000Z

Fellow member Dave Adams and I completed the 15 mile Wirral Walk in five hours yesterday to raise money for the station. Every single step hurt after the 10 mile mark when my blisters started, and today I am hobbling around like a 90 year old. Fortunately the weather was ideal (unlike last year when it rained constantly) and I've even got a sun tan. Between us we've raised around 235 pounds, which will be used to pay ongoing running costs such as equipment maintenance.

Station still silent

2007-05-12T18:10:00.000Z

Still no sign of us going back on air, almost six weeks after we discovered the fault. The engineers have been having a good look at it and think they've narrowed it down to a problem with the cable linking the studio with the wards. It has now been decided it is easier to just replace the line rather than checking every inch of it for a problem. But until it's installed, we remain off the air. It's very frustrating, but there is little we can do other than chivvy the hospital along to get it sorted as soon as possible.

Still off the air

2007-04-23T19:57:00.000Z

We're still off the air, although the technical bods say it's nothing to do with the new high voltage main they were having installed at around the same time we went off the air. They've reached this conclusion because the cable linking our studio with the distribution box which transmits our signal around the site does not, apparently, pass through that area. I'm not entirely convinced myself, but we have no choice but to go with their diagnosis. We now await a visit from the contractor who deals with the distribution of our signal to see if he can identify the fault. It is most frustrating for the presentation team, and I am now getting daily text messages asking when we are going back on the air. Before too long we will also start getting calls from ward managers as well. I've made the best use of the time off air and the new version of our computer software is now installed and seems to be working well bar one or two minor technical glitches. And there's better news in the long term, because the hospital have now told us they are looking at installing new bedside units throughout the site.

Productive use of time off-air

2007-04-10T08:28:00.000Z

The works department is now on the case trying to identify why we have gone off the air. Hopefully it can be sorted fairly easily as we think we've identified the cause of the problem.

Meanwhile, I have used the studio downtime to upload all of the new station jingles featuring our new slogan: "Your Music - Your Station". When we go back on air, "Here When You Need Us Most" will be consigned to the broadcasting bin where it will join other previous station straplines such as "Cuddly Clatterbridge" and "The station that fits snugly in your ear" - yuk!

It was only around 10 years ago that we first put together a consistent on-air jingle package. Before that, presenters generally did what they wanted. This was great for them, but totally confusing for the audience. One programme even had its own news jingle, which only they used! Some people took news bulletins, others didn't. At times it was like listening to 20 different radio stations and was a complete mish-mash. Nowadays, we know the importance of a consistent station sound so that patients identify us very quickly when they tune in.

Silence is not golden

2007-04-06T14:23:00.000Z

Discovered this morning that the hospital's engineers appear to have cut through the cable linking the studio with the wards and no-one can hear us! Because it's the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, there's not a hope of getting it sorted before Tuesday, so I've suspended all programmes until further notice. This has happened before, about seven or eight years ago when they were building a new road through the hospital site. From memory it took well over a week to get sorted then. Fingers crossed it can be resolved quite quickly this time...

Technology Is Wonderful

2007-03-29T18:02:00.001Z

We're very hi-tech at Radio Clatterbridge, with a state-of-the-art computer system that keeps us on the air around the clock.

Our music library, containing thousands of singles, albums and CD's accumulated over the 56 years we've been on the air, is becoming more and more redundant. We're down to just one record deck in the studio and even CD's get played less often. We're having a record sale at Wirral Rugby Club on Sunday May 13th to offload some of our more dusty records because some haven't been played for decades, if ever.

Most of our songs are now played from a clever computer programme called Myriad which allows presenters to select the tune they want by dragging and dropping it into a box on the screen before playing it on the air. This is great when it works properly. Fortunately it crashes only occasionally, usually because of a glitch with the hard drive.

We upgraded to the latest version last year, but sadly our computer doesn't seem to like it and crashes each time we try to use it. Hopefully this willl be sorted next month when a nice man from software company P Squared pays a visit.

All this technology doesn't come cheap though, as we have to pay a few hundred quid per year for technical support plus a lot more for a site visit. The advantages are huge though. Gone are the days when we had to use BBC Radio Two as a sustaining service for the 18 hours a day we weren't on the air live. It was most confusing for listeners and occasionally we'd get calls from patients complaining that Bob Harris Country had been replaced by a Radio Clatterbridge programme!

Technology has made a huge difference to the service we offer.

Reaching the audience

2007-03-07T20:25:00.000Z

We had some frustrating news recently about the broadcasting system we use. At the moment our output is pumped down the landlines of the hospital telephone system onto the wards and patients listen to us on flexible soft plastic headphones which are plugged into an old-fashioned control unit.

The headphones are not very comfortable to wear for long periods and each set costs a whopping 4 pounds to replace - even more expensive than a pair of cheap headphones. Fortunately, the Clatterbridge Hospital League of Friends are incredibly generous and give us money to replenish stocks when they either pass their sell by date, become a hygiene hazard or accidentally end up in the laundry.

The hospital had been due to install a brand new all singing, all dancing broadcasting system which would have enabled patients to listen to radio and television on a hi-tech bedside screen. Unfortunately, it now appears the new system isn't going ahead. This is disappointing because it had been the answer to the broadcasting problems that we suffer on some wards.

Each week our request collectors find people who want to listen but simply can't because the existing system is so old and difficult to maintain to a decent standard. We are seeking clarification on how we can work with the Hospital Trust to improve the situation, and I'll keep you posted on developments.

Helping the hospital

2007-02-11T21:14:00.000Z

I'm really keen for us to be an integral part of the hospital's communication with patients and staff, particularly as we have got a captive audience! Many hospital radio stations solely concentrate on collecting requests, but I believe it's vital that management are aware of the value of our service in getting corporate messages across.

We already run Community News bulletins containing information about the chapel, restaurant, smoke free policy and so on, but we are looking to do more. A good example is an interview I recorded a few weeks back with hospital Chief Executive Len Richards explaining about Foundation Trust status. I've carved it up and we're using it in trailers telling listeners in simple terms what the changes are all about and encouraging them to get involved in the running of the hospital as 'public members'. The hospital are also going to run it as a podcast on their website.

Len was keen for us to record interviews with him on a regular basis which we can run in our output and the hospital can use online. As long as the topics are strong enough and relevant to the audience I think it will really add to our output.

New station slogan

2007-01-15T21:54:00.000Z

One of the projects for 2007 which I am currently working on is changing the station strapline, or slogan. At its most basic level, the strapline is there to sell to listeners what exactly the station is all about. We have been using 'Here When You Need Us Most' for almost 10 years now, but I have thought for a while that it does not really sum up what we do.

There is no exact science to choosing a strapline, but I do feel quite strongly that great slogans encapsulate in just a few words what a product does.

Several years ago, many local radio stations started using the word 'variety' in their slogans. At one stage, it seemed that every station played the best variety of music, which was of course a nonsense. Apparently it was because the word came up time and time again when researchers were looking into what people wanted from a radio station. The programmers cottoned on to this and the theory was that if a station said it played a wide variety of songs, listeners would believe it - even if the said station only had 750 songs on its playlist! I never quite believed that people could be that gullible, and the phase now seems to have passed.

For Radio Clatterbridge, I spent some time thinking about the core nature of what we do in order to devise a form of words that I felt best fitted. Essentially we play requests for patients and staff at any time of the day or night, along with information relevant to their stay in hospital. After a couple of days in a darkened room, I settled on 'Your Music, Your Station'. It's short, simple and expresses quite clearly that listeners control the output.

The new strapline will be tricky for the presenters. They are that used to saying 'Radio Clatterbridge, Here When You Need Us Most' every time they open the microphone that it is bound to take a while to get used to it. I think I will stick a big sign on the mixer so they do not forget!

There are also a whole pile of new jingles to record, and we are using it as a chance to freshen up how we sound on the air. Our voice over man is coming in (when he has got rid of his cold!) and I have got Andy Jackson (son of 4-2-7 Daily presenter Neil) on the case. He is a whizz with computer software, has more sound effects than the BBC gramophone library and will have them mixed down in no time at all. I will get the webmaster to upload them on to the website when we put them to air so the anoraks among you can have a listen!

Welcome!

2007-01-04T12:35:00.000Z

Hello and welcome to my new blog.

The general idea is for me to post my own thoughts, musings and details about programming at Radio Clatterbridge.

Hopefully it will give you a bit of an insight into how the radio station is run and the reasons behind the various strands of our output.

In simple terms, my job is develop programming ideas, support and develop our team of volunteer presenters and ensure our output is suitable for the patients and staff at Clatterbridge Hospital, Wirral.

Keep coming back as there will be regular updates!

Paul.