How Hospital Hospitality TV Enhances Patient Care
Most hotels provide hospitality TVs to streamline the in-room entertainment experience for guests.
However, this technology is not limited to the hospitality industry. Healthcare facilities like hospitals and senior living communities can also benefit tremendously from implementing hospitality TV systems.
Integrating hospitality TV technology into your healthcare or senior living facility is not overly complicated nowadays. With Smart TV platforms and streaming devices, you can easily provide patients and residents access to streaming content, video calling, web browsing, and more. You don’t need an exorbitant budget to provide these services either.
Providing this type of technology in senior care facilities is an increasingly popular topic of discussion. It provides seniors with much-needed mental stimulation to help keep their minds sharp.
That’s because keeping their minds engaged with content and activities can help seniors maintain strong memory, reduce stress, promote emotional health, and improve focus. Let’s explore in more detail how this technology can benefit seniors.
Seniors Can Keep Their Minds Sharp By Playing Video Games
Despite the stereotype that seniors are not serious gamers, studies show that seniors who regularly play video games receive numerous cognitive benefits.
Video games have been shown to counteract and potentially even reverse the damaging effects of aging on the brain. Seniors who participated in one study and played video games regularly demonstrated improvements in memory, focus, and processing speed.
Video games designed specifically for senior citizens integrate mental exercise into an engaging, entertaining experience. They exercise abilities like memory, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
When selecting games for seniors, look for ones with adjustable difficulty levels, simple controls, and cognitively stimulating content. All of this can easily be provided through a hospitality TV system.
You Can Make Residents Feel At Home
According to a recent study, access to a TV helps nursing home residents feel more at home in senior living communities. Among all personal possessions, including furniture, residents placed the highest value on their televisions. It serves as both entertainment for them and a means of staying connected to the outside world.
If a TV is located in one of the common living spaces in your healthcare facility, it also presents social opportunities. Even just organizing regular movie nights provides residents an activity to bond over and look forward to.
And with streaming platforms available directly through hospitality TVs, you can easily hold themed movie nights featuring different genres, actors, or decades.
Seniors Love Watching and Enjoying Sporting Events
Most seniors thoroughly enjoy watching sports content on TV. They like being able to actively watch their favorite teams playing. Here are some interesting facts about seniors and their sports viewing habits:
- Some seniors watch golf just to help them fall asleep!
- Passively watching sports can alsobenefit seniors by meeting needs for mental and emotional stimulation.
- Many seniors probably attended games in person when they were younger. But mobility limitations now prevent them from regularly attending sports events.
- With today’s high-def TVs, seniors get an up-close, front-row view of the action on the field – an experience impossible with older TVs.
- For many seniors, the TV has replaced the stadium seats as the best view in the house!
Ensuring your senior living facility has TV access to sporting events is a great way to enrich your residents’ lives. The games spark nostalgia and give them an opportunity to connect with family members over shared interests.
TV Helps Residents Stay More Up-To-Date with Life Events
Having a television available can be incredibly helpful for seniors living in care facilities to stay up-to-date on important events and appointments in their lives. Unlike a printed calendar or schedule that can easily be misplaced or forgotten about, alerts and notifications displayed right on the TV screen are hard to ignore.
As we get older, it’s common for our memories to become less reliable. Having those reminders and alerts pop up on the TV eliminates the need to actively keep track of things like doctor’s appointments, medication times, community events, etc.
It acts as a foolproof backup system to jog the memory. Seniors are much more likely to see and process information presented in large text on a TV compared to squinting at tiny notifications on a smartphone screen.
Plus, it’s pretty hard to lose track of the TV in your living room! Phones can be misplaced or run out of power, but the TV sitting front and center is a persistent reminder. For these reasons, having an internet-connected smart TV available is a great way to help residents stay informed.
It Can Help the Seniors To Save Money
Cable TV packages don’t come cheap these days. Most households spend upwards of $200 per month for a decent channel bundle. Add on another $10-15 per month for each individual streaming service subscription, and many homes end up spending more money on television and entertainment than utilities like electricity or water.
Research shows that seniors actually watch much more traditional television content from cable packages than younger audiences who prefer streaming services. So requiring seniors to pay hundreds of dollars per month for cable TV access that they realistically don’t need could put a significant financial strain on them.
By providing a basic cable package in senior living communities as part of the standard amenities, costs can be contained for residents trying to stick to a fixed income. The discounted “hospitality” packages provided to care facilities are much cheaper for cable and satellite companies to provide than individual residential accounts. So incorporating television access into the senior living package helps ensure residents can enjoy themselves without breaking the bank.
If cable or streaming TV is not provided as part of their residence, statistics clearly show that many seniors would sign up for television on their own at full price. Giving them affordable access is the compassionate thing to do for their quality of life. The additional cost to the community is relatively small compared to what cable companies would charge for dozens of individual accounts. So essentially everyone wins in this type of arrangement.
TVs Can Help Seniors to Stick on Their Fitness Goals
Access to television in healthcare settings plays an important role for elderly patients and others undergoing rehabilitation treatment. Streaming fitness videos and customized exercise programs displayed on the TV screen provide a novel, engaging way for patients to achieve recovery goals.
Research unfortunately shows the majority of seniors do not get the recommended amount of physical activity. But studies also show that seniors are much more likely to stick with and enjoy age-appropriate exercise routines compared to conventional fitness regimes that may be too challenging. This highlights the value of TV access for providing senior-friendly workouts.
With over 300 workout videos available to stream even from a basic Amazon Prime subscription, the TV is a perfect vehicle for serving up rehab and wellness programming to engage patients. The key advantage is that video instructors allow each person to move at their own pace, with full control to pause, rewind segments, or skip ahead as needed. This self-directed approach provides confidence for seniors still gaining strength and mobility.
A Television Can Be A Great Companion For Isolated Patients
For patients confined to their rooms due to limited mobility or illness, a television can provide much-needed company and entertainment to brighten long, lonely days. Smart TVs present options for isolated individuals to combat boredom and engage in activities from the comfort of bed when physical participation with others is not possible.
With video chat apps and smart capability, patients can join in community events, conversations, or celebrations right on screen. For example, if your senior living facility hosts a holiday party in the common area, a resident restricted to their room could still log on to interact and enjoy the festivities virtually.
A voice-controlled remote simplifies channel surfing and app navigation for those with dexterity limitations. So adding television access enables homebound patients to feel socially connected through technology.
Using TVs to Create Quarantine-Proofing Rooms
The pandemic clearly demonstrated the crucial role of TV as a practical and human necessity for facilities housing vulnerable seniors and hospital patients suddenly isolated from normal routines. Without television access, many would have endured weeks or months utterly alone, with little entertainment or distraction from health worries.
So looking ahead, TVs now provide more than just diversion – they enable video chat apps to connect isolated residents with loved ones for emotional support.
Forward-thinking senior communities must equip private rooms to serve as full-functioning quarantine spaces, complete with large smart TVs for entertainment, communication, and telehealth purposes. Such “future-proofing” ensures residents always have support and interaction available at the click of a remote.
Hospital Patients Tend To Watch Around 11 Hours Of Television Per Day
Bedridden patients face abundant empty hours with limited activity options to fill the time. A television can provide nostalgic comforts of home and much-needed diversion from pain or anxiety over upcoming medical procedures. Studies show hospital patients watch nearly 11 hours of TV daily – compared to 3-4 hours for general consumers. Clearly, patients place extremely high value on continual television access during their stay.
In fact, quality and selection of TV channels now directly impacts surveys on patient satisfaction and perception of hospital care. Providing premium entertainment options demonstrates compassion for the vulnerable, isolated reality many inpatients face. Boredom takes mental and physical tolls – so TV keeps spirits bright and recovery smooth.
The Future of Healthcare and Hospitality Television
forward-looking care centers now realize television provide far more than entertainment – it is a lifeline keeping isolated patients engaged, informed, and connected to care. The explosive growth of user-friendly telehealth apps allows instant patient-doctor video consultations – but only if rooms are equipped with web-capable televisions. More than ever, modern healthcare demands reliable television access as both a practical patient need and public health strategy.
Cloud-Based Patient Care Can Enable Remote Caregiving
Specialized mobile and web apps now allow seamless audio-visual check-ins between patients and offsite caregivers or family members.
With a voice-activated television remote, even technologically-limited seniors can initiate video chats and telehealth consultations. Cloud-based platforms turn in-room TVs into user-friendly portals for remote care without confusion over multiple devices.
Providing access to telehealth services has therefore become imperative. As early as 2016, telehealth usage grew 60% in just one year for routine consultations, mental health services, managing chronic illnesses and more. Clearly, teleconnected care is the future – and forward-looking senior communities are installing secure smart TV systems to enable 24/7 access without isolation.
Contactless yet compassionate care is now simply a television click away.
