RadioLove

The power of radio is not that it speaks to millions, but that it speaks intimately and privately to each one of those millions.
- Hallie Flanagan

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Comforting Caring
Connecting

About

I myself am a true believer that having music on in the background is a therapeutic treatment for those individuals in intensive care, from personal experience I found that having music played to me gave me a feeling of familiarity, during such a time of uncertainty.

– ICU Ward Sister (anon)

Radiolove simply wants to provide digital radio’s to intensive care units within our NHS, since 2017 we have wanted to help patients of ICU, together with the nurses and doctors who care for them.

Our aim is to reach out to as many intensive care wards as we can, making them aware of radiolove and what we are trying to do.

With your help, we want to build and grow our community so that we can help all those who need us.

The seeds of Radiolove were first sown in 2019 and we started our work in the autumn of 2020 by approaching a small group of intensive care and high dependency units.

We wanted to test our belief that the simple donation of a few radio's might be welcomed and make a positive contribution to the care that they provided.

More about Radio love

How

Radiolove is a young project starting out on a journey that we hope will make a small but positive change.

So far, we have managed to donate over forty radios to twelve hospitals, it’s a small start that has made us determined to do more. We want our new website to be the platform connecting our supporters to ICU clinical teams around the country. Our hope is that we can bring like-minded people together and share our appreciation for the work that these specialist nurses and doctors do each day.

The pandemic has made us value our NHS more now than ever before, the media has highlighted the devotion of the staff working within ICU during the hardest of times. At Radiolove, we want to continue to say thank you, to remind our nurses and doctors that they are still our heroes. To provide them with something that we know will be welcomed and appreciated equally by patients, their families, friends and staff alike.

Fundraising

Our aim is to reach out to as many intensive care wards as we can, making them aware of radiolove and what we are trying to do, more importantly we want to share and learn with them.

We have learnt that the gift of a radio is a small but powerful thing, it’s a gesture that Comforts, Cares and Connects. Our own experience of ICU has shown us that a radio has many positive uses, it can brighten our day and it can bring us together.

More about fundraising

Comforting

Sedation is sometimes a necessary course treatment used within ICU, the decision to sedate or place a patient within an induced coma is not taken lightly.

If our love-one is sedated, it lets the clinical teams to control our breathing, letting our bodies and immune systems conserve vital energy, energy needed to aid recovery from a serious illness or injury.

During sedation, our hearing is known to be the last of our senses to leave us when we enter sedation and the first to return when awakening. Should we be partly sedated, then our hearing never really leaves us.

If ICU & HDU wards can use a radio, then we might be comforted by the sound of our favourite music.

Caring

The clinical teams of ICU work incredibly long hours, often under great pressure. Since 2019, we have reached out to some who have told us that they have purchased radios themselves for their patients, this cannot be fair.

Our nurses already understand the benefit that radios can bring to their wards, but sadly, very few NHS trusts can afford to budget for them.

Music being played within the workplace can bring some small relief to the pressures of the day.

With a radio playing quietly in the background during the quieter moments, nurses cannot help but hum and tap their feet to the rhythm of the music (they just can’t!).

Connecting

When someone close to us spends time within an intensive care or high dependency unit our first instinct will be to stay close to them and be with them on their journey back to health. They will be placed within the care of specialist nurses, a team of dedicated and professional staff who will need time and space to care for their patients.

There will be times when we cannot visit in person and a sense of disconnection will be perfectly normal. Our favourite music has a unique way of bonding us, it can act as a trigger to recall a special memory that we shared.

The music that a radio provides can connect us, wherever we are, whatever we are doing.

Send us a message

Office Address

44 Grand Parade

Brighton

East Sussex

BN2 9QA