Paris (AFP)
France Culture and the AP-HP have launched a radio intended to accompany patients with Covid-19, alternating moments of escape and meditation, Radio France announced on Wednesday.
Called "Culture and Company", the radio offers "sick people a precious accompaniment in this ordeal, with a variety of soothing and entertaining content, chosen with the AP-HP teams and composed of readings, discovery programs or even relaxation and meditation programs, "Radio France said in a press release.
We listen to the historian Michel Pastoureau talk about the figure of the rooster, the psychiatrist Christophe André of nostalgia, or a documentary on Coluche, which incites to "laugh at everything".
This radio imagined in partnership with the AP-HP (Public Assistance - Hospitals of Paris) is available on the France Culture website and can be offered to patients via their smartphones, or tablets made available thanks to donations.
"Culture and company" is also accessible to the public, in particular to the suffering and not hospitalized people.
The idea came from Michèle Levy-Soussan, head of the mobile support and palliative care unit at the Pitié-Salpêtrière-AP-HP hospital, who contacted France Culture.
"For hospitalized patients, the issue of isolation quickly emerged as an essential dimension of this health crisis," said the doctor in a radio statement. "Caregivers, also deprived of the presence of families with patients, then become word couriers, and we had to invent new forms of links".
"A patient and their family can thus listen to the same thing at the same time," Sandrine Treiner, director of France Culture, told AFP.
The program loop, which lasts around thirty hours, will be renewed each week, with feedback from caregivers, and for an indefinite period.
This radio is one of three devices designed by Radio France with the AP-HP to "support patients and pay tribute to caregivers in an appropriate manner in these circumstances," said Sibyle Veil, President of Radio France.
Franceinfo will offer a special day behind the scenes of a hospital, "to honor the caregivers of the hospitals of the AP-HP". Then, every day at 8 p.m., the radio will broadcast testimonies from caregivers, taken up in podcasts.
France Inter will also be offering a charitable edition of the "1000 euro game" on Sunday 12 April. All the profits will be donated to the "All united against the virus" alliance, with the Fondation de France, the AP-HP and the Pasteur Institute.
The NRJ group also announced on Wednesday the creation of a digital radio station, "Heroes", to "support and facilitate the daily life of nursing staff". Animated by the voices of the NRJ group, the radio relays solidarity initiatives in France and Belgium.
© 2020 AFP