Music on the Torbay Hospital wards at last

To all the people that have donated to the hospital radio charity, this is what you have helped us to achieve, writes PAUL HARDING from Torbay Hospital Radio.

Your donations via our website and our outside broadcasts has enabled us to broadcast on 95.9 FM and help the patients to listen and join in with the shows.

A special mention goes to our local MP Kevin Foster for his support in this venture.

We received a request from Joanna, from McCallum Ward, to provide radios to entertain the patients, and our chairman Lee Thomas delivered the first three with headphones recently.

This is the first of the new rollout to take place, to update and increase the number of radios that are already in the hospital, and has since been followed by delivering more to the eye clinic.

We would dearly like to ensure that all the patients and visitors can hear us when they want to and traditional radios seemed an easy way to do this. But we are, of course, available digitally and via smart speakers.

We have many future projects planned to allow us to improve our support of patients in the wards, including getting a second studio up and running providing more live shows.

We also plan to upgrade our outside broadcasting kit. You may have seen us shivering at various events in Brixham, Bovey Tracey and Torquay in December.

Also during the past year, Torbay Hospital Radio was one of the charities supported by the Co-op Local Community Fund. Thanks to everyone’s support and shopping habits, we have raised £2,757!

This is an incredible amount, bearing in mind we have to raise all our own funding and as you can imagine running a radio station is not without substantial costs.

Another mention I should make is Brixham Marina, which a few years ago was run by one of our presenters Andrew Millar.

Unfortunately, Andrew sadly passed away last year. He was a dedicated volunteer and presenter at our charity. Andrew hosted the weekend breakfast show. He was full of love and humour, a brilliant entertainer. Andrew was a massive part of the local community, supporting many charitable and worthwhile causes.

Brixham Marina and their berth holders raised a whopping £1,050 for Torbay Hospital Radio, for which we are extremely grateful.

But Andrew’s involvement in the community spread to rugby also and Westcountry Wasps RFC have also raised funds on our behalf which will go towards the studio upgrades.

In these difficult times, the generosity we see is humbling and from all of us at hospital radio, we would like to say thank you and wish you all a happy new year.