‘It’s a two-hour window where children can escape from the ward’

Kate Harris sits behind the sound mixing desk in a small radio studio, almost every inch of the walls covered in hand-made posters and photographs. She cues up the songs, puts her headphones on, pulls a microphone adorned with purple feathers and a cuddly toy towards her and waits for the jingle to end. “Welcome to the show everybody! I am DJ Splinter and this is Radio Lollipop, hoorah!”

She is upbeat, playful and in her element as the host of the evening show, which is being broadcast onto the wards of Bristol Children’s Hospital tonight, as it has done since 1984. Playing music 24 hours a day in hospitals across the world, with local live volunteer DJs like Kate taking to the airwaves during the evenings and weekends, the station is designed to comfort and entertain the young people staying at the hospital, taking their minds off the difficult situations they are in.

“There are two reasons why I got involved in Radio Lollipop,” Kate says as she cues Carly Rae Jepson’s Call Me Maybe. “I’m an ex-patient of the children’s hospital – I had cancer when I was four years old. So I spent most of my childhood in hospital. Unfortunately Radio Lollipop wasn’t around in those days, but I remember being in the playroom and the play assistants coming to visit me.

“And then both of my sisters volunteered for Radio Lollipop before I did, and they used to come home and tell stories about all the fun things they’d been up to. I was looking for something extra to do because I had a lot of spare time and I thought I’d like to get involved. And 13 years later I’m still here!” she laughs uproariously. Kate has progressed through the ranks to manage the team of volunteers, and has been DJing alongside for around five years.

“My DJ name was picked for me by a patient who I’d known for a long time. When I was first training to be a DJ, two of the volunteers went out onto the ward and asked him to think of a name for me. He came up with DJ Splinter because he was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan and Splinter was their leader. He drew a picture of what my outfit should be, my Radio Lollipop car, and five reasons why I should be DJ Splinter – I’ve still got it at home. So that’s stuck now, forever!”

Volunteers also run play sessions for young patients when the radio is broadcasting

The pop music drifts over into the playroom next door, where volunteers including PhD student Beth Russell are helping a handful of young patients to play games and do craft activities. “Everyone we volunteer with is lovely, and it’s nice when the kids leave happy at the end of the session with their crafts,” she says in between chatting with 15-year old Sky, who is sitting in her wheelchair wearing a Pikachu beanie. “It’s a stark difference between here and when you go out onto the ward – it’s an escape being in here. The kids like that we’re not nurses or doctors.”

On the adjacent table, six-year-old Jenson has come in wearing his dinosaur pyjamas, accompanied by his mum Catherine. “We didn’t know this was here,” she says as he draws a design on a scrap of paper, to be turned into a pin badge. “I wasn’t expecting to find something like this at all: it helps to make it more normal, as if we’re at a playgroup rather than in hospital.”

A dad and his young son put their heads around the door to find out what’s going on and the volunteers greet them. Dad explains that they are visiting his other son on the ward and will stop in for the play session for as long as they can: the consultant is due to come any minute. He keeps his phone in his hand, anxiously checking the screen to see that he’s not missed a call. Through the studio door, Kate looks up from the computer screen where she’s been cueing up tonight’s music. “If you’ve got any songs you’d like me to play, let me know,” she says with a kind smile.

Radio Lollipop runs in more than 30 hospitals around the world

Radio Lollipop began in 1979 at Queen Mary´s Hospital for Children in Carshalton in Surrey, and then spread around other hospitals in the UK, including what was Bristol Royal Hospital for Sick Children on St Michael’s Hill, before moving with the hospital to its new building in 2001. The first Radio Lollipop outside the UK was set up in 1985 in Australia, and now there are radio stations in more than 30 hospitals around the English-speaking world.

Studies conducted in Australia have even found that Radio Lollipop had clinical benefits for patients, and positive knock-on effects for hospitals themselves. At Princess Margaret Hospital Perth in Western Australia, postgraduate research reported an 82 per cent reduction in requests for painkillers after children attended Radio Lollipop sessions, while at Mater Children’s Hospital in Brisbane, this reduction in the numbers of drugs patients took resulted in savings of over $400,000 during the first year that Radio Lollipop was in operation.

The Radio Lollipop studio is decorated with creations made by the children that it helps

“We see quite a lot of the children over a long period of time, and it’s brilliant to see their progress from when we first meet them,” Kate says. “Some children have had traumatic events happen to them, like a brain tumour, and when they are first well enough to come and see us they may not be able to interact or speak, but by the end of their recovery they are chatting away. They’re like a completely different child and it’s amazing to see that difference.

“I love to see how much difference these sessions can make to a child’s stay and their family as well. It’s a two-hour window where they can just escape from the ward, come and do something fun, something different and take their mind off what’s happening. A lot of the children here are not just from Bristol – because it’s a specialist centre for the South West, we get a lot of families who come from further afield. They’re not really familiar with the Bristol area, so it’s nice for them to come in and have a chat with us.”

For the 20 volunteers who make up the Bristol team, having fun on the airwaves and in the playroom goes hand-in-hand with helping children and families through some of the most challenging times of their lives. “A lot of the comments we get from family and friends are people saying ‘thank you so much for what you’re doing’ and that they’ve had a lovely time,” Kate continues “It’s very rewarding. We even get children who say they want to volunteer here when they grow up, because they’ve had so much fun here and because of the difference that we make to them and their families. It makes me emotional! It’s so sweet.”

Radio Lollipop at Bristol Children’s Hospital is currently looking for more volunteers both on the radio and in the playroom, and for donations of arts, crafts and games. They are also looking for local companies to make them their charity of the year. To find out more, visit www.radiolollipop.org or email bristol@radiolollipop.org