Our hospital is beginning a big patient satisfaction initiative and each department has been asked to come up with ideas to help boost patient satisfaction and make their stay as comfortable and as pleasant as possible. One of the many ideas was to create a patient leisure reading service.
Our library used to have this service a few years ago but it died. At the time, it needed to die. We had outdated and damaged materials, (Reader's Digest books from 1950 and Sports Illustrated magazines from 1989) and the volunteers who used to circulate the book cart on the floors had left.
Now the powers that be have asked me to look into this service again. I sent out a email to the HLS-list asking librarians about this type of service in their hospitals. I asked what was successful, who maintained it, where was the collection housed and how did you aquire the collection?

Here are the results:

• About the same number of people responded that it was/is successful as those who said it was unsuccessful and eliminated.
• Most of those who responded said this type of service relies heavily on volunteers.
• Most donated books and magazines came from hospital staff donations.
• A few people mentioned getting books from public library donations (books sale leftovers and multiple copy discards).
• Some people mentioned getting magazines from the post office and undeliverable and unforwarded mail.
• This program relies very heavily on volunteers. In general programs with few volunteers are limping along while popular programs have a good pool of reliable volunteers.
• A large part of the collection is often housed in either the library or volunteer office.
• Some hospitals have the collection out on the floors on bookshelves or carts in waiting rooms while the unsorted donations are stored in the library or volunteer area.
• Successful programs had volunteers regularly bring the cart around to patients during the week. Off hours (evenings and weekends) the books were still available on carts or shelves on the floor.
• One librarian responded that their hospital circulates DVDs and VHS tapes.

Where do I go from here?

While I think it would be great idea to circulate DVD and VHS tapes, I don't think it is practical for the hospital at this time. Rooms at our hospital do not have DVD or VHS players. That is most unfortunate, because I think this service would be very popular.

I have already met informally with our volunteer services coordinator and she has informed me that they have no problem getting recent magazines and they have one volunteer chomping at the bit to get the program started. Now we have to have a more official meeting to discuss the number of volunteers, housing of the collection, circulating the collection, acquiring and weeding materials, and the sustainability of the program.

My homework before that meeting is to contact public libraries in my area to see about donated books. I will keep you up to date on my progress. But in the mean time if anybody has some ideas or suggestions feel free to comment so that we all can learn from what is said.