26 January 2001
A new magazine went on sale in British hospitals this week, with the aim of raising an extra £5m to make patients' stays more comfortable.
The team behind feelgood hope that sales of their glossy mix of entertainment and information will make a considerable contribution to hospital coffers. The hospital or health centre where the magazine is distributed will receive 40p of the £1 cover price for every copy sold.
An unpaid army of salespeople drawn from a pool of 200,000 volunteers began hawking the quarterly to a captive audience of patients at 200 hospitals across the country on January 23.
The magazine had an initial print run of 150,000, but the team behind feelgood believe they could eventually sell enough copies to provide NHS hospitals with the extra £5m a year.
The League of Friends, which already raises £30m for the NHS, and the Women's Royal Voluntary Service are selling the magazine and will allocate profits to fundraising projects.
Dr Liz Wilkinson, an NHS eye specialist and feelgood's founding editor, says individual hospitals will decide how the extra funding is used: 'Most NHS workers have a wish list. It might be bits of kit or computers for the kids. The money raised by feelgood will not necessarily go on health care as such, but the extra things that make the patients' lives better.
'The magazine is an extension of the fundraising efforts that go on in hospitals. It's no different to raising money in a volunteer shop, except we're not selling chocolates that rot your teeth.'
Feelgood has the full backing of the Department of Health, but is a privately funded project produced in association with publishers Marshall Cavendish.
A DoH spokeswoman dismissed comparisons with other publications, and denied feelgood will affect current budgets: 'The magazine is not a Big Issue for the NHS. We welcome the idea, the fact that it's sold by volunteers and that part of the money goes back into hospitals. There is no question of the money raised replacing existing funding.'
Feelgood has the support of the Patients' Association and the Royal College of Nursing. An RCN spokeswoman welcomed the magazine as 'part of the long tradition of hospital fundraising'.
PFjan2001
