Nobody likes to be kept waiting. Waiting can be annoying and frustrating for anyone, but they are significantly worse in hospital waiting rooms. There is something about sitting in a sterile room as you await a possibly life-changing medical diagnosis or a surgical outcome that just leaves people with debilitating anxiety.
Thankfully, hospital management recognizes this problem and makes intentional efforts to alleviate discomfort and help people feel relaxed. TVs are usually installed in hospital waiting rooms to increase the quality of the environment, sweep out some of the tension, and keep people engaged as they wait.
While this is great, it is equally important to display the right content on hospital TVs. To help you decide what shows belong on your TV and what doesn't, we have provided the best and worst things to show on hospital waiting TVs.
When people come into a hospital, they are often instructed to wait in the hospital waiting room before attending to by a doctor. A report by Autoinsurance shows that about 40% of patients have a waiting time of 15 minutes, while the median waiting time for a patient to be attended to is set to about 103 minutes. Spending a few minutes waiting in a hospital setting is terrible enough, but being made to wait for more than an hour can cause patients to feel frustrated, anxious, and express discontent.
The amount of time a patient waits in a hospital waiting room does not only cause them to suffer growing apprehension and discomfort but can be a stressor for the hospital staff. As patients grow agitated, they often take their frustrations out on the attending staff. A study shows that shorter waiting times help patients build confidence in doctors and health services provided. This feeling of satisfaction diminishes the longer patients have to wait.
In a bid to decrease a patient’s perceived waiting times, hospitals often filled waiting rooms with posters, leaflets, newspapers, and magazines. These items were provided to educate patients on health, inform them about various services available in the hospital, and serve as a form of entertainment
While these items served their purpose years ago, they have run their course and are now seen as outdated or obsolete. In a world that has grown to be largely dependent on technological devices like smartphones, it is understandable that these papers can quickly bore patients and do nothing to ease their anxiety while waiting.
Hospitals have now resorted to using TVs to reduce patients’ perceived wait times. With this digital device, they can display informative and entertaining content to the patients. Thanks to the magnetic effect of moving pictures on a screen, patients are more engaged and feel more relaxed as they spend time in the waiting room.
Getting the perfect TV service suitable for a TV waiting room can be an arduous task, especially since it is almost impossible to find services that provide quality entertainment like Loop TV does. Loop TV is a business TV that provides access to hundreds of engaging and on-demand channels bound to keep people entertained. They provide content that ranges from catchy music videos to trending news and sports highlights.
Loop TV provides service in every sense of the word. All you need to do is plug the player in and display excellent content to the patients in your waiting area.
Installing Loop TV into your hospital waiting room reduces the discomfort and problems associated with keeping a patient waiting. Some of the benefits of installing a TV include:
TV screens are engaging, mainly when they feature exciting content. Displaying informative or educational content is a great way to take a patient’s mind off how long they have to wait. Time passes faster when a patient is engaged, and an hour’s wait can feel like 30 minutes.
Displaying interesting content via your Loop TV player is a splendid way to keep patients too immersed in what is shown on TV to keep glancing at the block. Loop TV provides the perfect mixture of general entertainment in short durations of between 3-7 minutes, so patients are not bored by programs that drone on and on. With continuously changing content, patients would unsuspectingly wait out their time without making a fuss.
Waiting in a hospital comes with a sense of foreboding that patients cannot shake off no matter how hard they try. This can increase their anxiety, which could increase health complications. Waiting room TVs help ease people’s anxiety and nervousness, making them relaxed and more comfortable before they are taken in to see the doctor.
Content on waiting room TVs like nature footage goes a long way in helping patients relax. With the Loop TV player, hospitals can create a playlist solely filled with relaxing content like pictures of plants, animals, or any other form of wholesome videos.
Hospital waiting room TVs are often used as a subtle medium of educating patients on how to sustain good health. This can be done by displaying personalized content of pictures, videos, and customized texts in an engaging collage.
Other than providing great entertainment, Loop TV gives hospitals a chance to create and customize their own content using digital signage. This feature enables hospitals to create slideshows and playlists of educational content they can show to the patients. These contents can be scheduled and automated to be displayed at specific intervals.
The less they are aware of their long waiting times, the happier the patients are. This happiness or feeling of contentment leads the patients to project a positive attitude when communicating with the staff.
Hospital waiting room TVs can also be used to display pictures, qualifications, and skills of the staff to the patients. Patients knowing this information about the team not only serves as a means of introduction but also puts the patients’ minds at ease as they know they are in great hands.
With Loop TV, hospitals can upload staff pictures and follow them up with customized texts to tell the patients about the team.
Having a hospital waiting room TV is great but having a TV that runs on a Loop TV player is even better. This provides your patients with endless interactive and engaging content, and in the end, everyone is happy.
To keep patients immersed in the digital experience that TVs provide, it is essential to display the right kind of content. Good content would keep the patients relaxed and engaged as they wait their turn, and bad content will do the opposite. Knowing what content to show on your TV can be a challenge, but with our Loop TV, you do not need to look further. Below, we have provided the best things to show on hospital waiting room TVs.
Music is a real people-pleaser. There is something about symphonies and tunes that automatically relaxes the brain and lifts the mood. Music is even better when followed by a visually stimulating video concept.
A study carried out to investigate the effect of music on waiting patients showed that while it might not improve a person’s health status, music in hospital waiting rooms significantly lowered a patient’s stress level. Music reduces the built-up tension in the waiting room, allowing the patients' worries to fade away as they focus on the lyrics and the content of the video being displayed on the TV screen.
Admittedly, not all kinds of music are hospital waiting room material. Some songs and music videos are too rowdy or are full of content that some patients would find displeasing. This is where Loop TV comes to the rescue.
Loop TV not only provides a wide range of fully licensed music videos to choose from, but it also provides a valuable feature that allows its users to create a playlist of the music video they would like to display. This allows the hospital to filter out unwanted content and show what they prefer.
A hospital waiting room is often filled with people of different ages, including toddlers and adolescents. This means that not all types of visual content are suitable for the show on a waiting room TV.
When choosing what to display on a hospital waiting room TV, it is essential to keep in mind that children can become a part of the waiting audience at any time. This will require eliminating any content that is not rated G or General.
Thankfully, family-friendly entertainment like kid shows and funny viral videos are not only enjoyed by kids but people of all ages. With the Loop TV, hospitals can also create specific kid-friendly playlists to ensure that everyone, especially the little ones, remains entertained.
Sports are always welcome in a hospital waiting room. This is especially great for people who love the sense of adventure and thrill of engaging in activities like football, basketball, and skating.
Sports are often rated G for general viewing, making them a great inclusion in a hospital waiting room. Patients can keep up with their favorite sports, helping them to while away time as they wait to be called in by the doctor. As a plus, patients might be motivated to become involved in sports activities in a bid to stay as fit as the people they see on TV.
Loop TV provides a mixture of sports and stunts for ready viewing. These sports often include short clips so that visitors are shown a wide range of content from various sports without being bored. This way, everyone gets a bit of everything.
Hospital waiting room staff often get too busy and might forget to switch the channels so that people remain engaged and enjoy a variety of entertainment. Loop TV provides a unique feature that can automatically change the channels to display what you want. All you need to do is schedule your content, and you can give the patients quality entertainment without breaking away from your jobs.
There are visual contents that have no business in a hospital waiting room. These contents might further stress the patients, agitate them, and increase the tension of waiting to see a doctor. Some of the contents that should not be displayed on a hospital waiting room TV include:
While the news is a great way to keep up with the rest of the nation and even perhaps, the world, the news should not be displayed on TVs inside a hospital waiting room. Patients come to the hospital bearing the burden of health issues on their shoulders. Displaying bad news to patients who are already stressed would deteriorate their mood even more.
News today often comes with unfortunate information that strikes a note of sadness or anger in people. The waiting room is a positive area where people relax and destress. Introducing any negative news into the area will be like introducing a stinky fart into a space of clean-smelling air. This would ruin the atmosphere.
Patients are already agitated before being directed to the waiting room. They are on edge as they await news about a growing health concern that could be life-changing.
Patients do not want to see blood on TV screens. It is simply not the right place nor the right time for it. Many patients are squeamish at the sight of blood, and all patients will agree that seeing blood before going to the doctor’s does nothing to calm their already frayed nerves.
Patients in hospital waiting rooms do not want to see jump-scares from horror movies and have their blood pressure shoot through the roof. Any show that includes violence or gore should not be found in a hospital waiting room.
People’s views differ a lot when it comes to politics. Every patient is different and harbors different ideologies about political parties and the government in general.
Displaying political content in a hospital waiting room might cause a negative mood change in a patient, which might lead to stress. Since stress is one thing waiting rooms aim to get rid of, it is a no-brainer that political contents are not welcome in the room.
Hospital waiting room staff needs to make conscious efforts to filter out harmful content from being displayed on the TV. This would keep negative attitudes at bay and help the patients remain relaxed while passing the time.
Loop TV is a splendid TV content tool for hospital waiting rooms. It contains a wide array of entertainment options and features that makes it possible to customize the display of those contents. This is not only great for the patients but also eases the waiting room staff of the stress that comes with controlling TV content while handling a bush schedule.
To set up premium TV service with Loop TV, simply enter the hospital details and an address your loop player should be delivered to on the official Loop TV website. The Loop TV player will arrive at no cost and all that remains is to plug in and play!
