Patients Trust TV

Version imprimable

Health information and advertising is now being delivered via digital signage to National Health Service patients in UK waiting rooms. 
 
QTV distributes health information (signposting service information, health promotion campaigns etc) designed, developed and managed by NHS Rotherham Creative Media Services (CMS).
 
Starting from programme production through to networked distribution and broadcast, QTV is run very much as a public service TV station with its own unique channel brand.
 
A research project conducted in partnership with Manchester Business School revealed that compared to other forms of receiving health information it was rated by patients as only second to receiving trusted information directly from a doctor or other clinician.
 
NHS Rotherham have been delivering content via QTV since 1997.  It has evolved from VHS tapes, through to DVDs (delivered every two months), and finally the current Onelan digital signage solution.
 

Programmes are scheduled into the daily play list located on one of the Net-Top-Box (NTB) 5005’s. The production team keeps two NTB’s in the studio, one as a test bed for quality control/training purposes and the other as their main publisher box. Once encoded, content is published and uploaded to a dedicated FTP server.
 
Finally overnight downloads are made across the local NHS IT network to avoid interruptions to critical clinical IT activities and maximise usage of NHS bandwidth. This results in a seamless public facing information service that can be updated and refreshed daily if required.
 
The TV screens are subdivided into zones, which display continuous video programmes, local breaking news in the form of scrolling text, along with time and a tickertape for adhoc information specific to each screen location.
 
Hourly updates of news and current affairs through the medium of BBC News24 are delivered through the freeview TV input.