No business starting that early

Radio Reviews: Isn't 8.30am on a Saturday morning a bit on the early side for a business programme (The Business, RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday)? Its slot before the summer break was mid-morning on Saturday, which isn't exactly a time when talk naturally turns to spreadsheets, so presenter John Murray wisely chose to create a lively business magazine programme that mixed human interest stories (gruelling business start-ups) with more hard-core items on share prices. Enough variety, in other words, to keep the general listener tuned in.

The perky new time slot demands a more serious business-focused programme. If you've made the effort to tune in at that hour of the morning, you're unlikely to be a mere audio tourist - you might actually be in the market for some serious business coverage. The first programme kept up the business-lite tone. Its main contributor was Brody Sweeney, who gets so much airplay I feel I could do nixers flogging his O'Brien's franchise for him - I know as much as I want to know about his business. Shouldn't a niche business programme be going out and finding new, more diverse voices?

Sweeney's ability to get airplay, however, must thrill whoever recruited him into Fine Gael as a potential candidate - last week Fianna Fáilers were all over the airwaves on foot of their party get-together in Co Cavan, and their canny decision to go for childcare as a headline-grabber. This week Fine Gael had its own think-in and I hardly heard anything about it - or if I did it passed by in such a soft-voiced blur I didn't notice it.

There's a jargon slot on Murray's show that would have a field day with all the buzz words used in Sheena Mackay's Architecture of Health (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday). It was all blue-sky thinking, but the connections it made between the well-being of patients and the physical environment of hospitals were fascinating.

A radical rethink, already happening in new hospital design in Britain and the US, is focusing on a changeover to single rooms. Nightingale wards, the programme said, have had their day and it's all about a design-led approach that's more to do with patient outcomes than cosmetic stuff such as putting the odd picture on the wall or a rubber plant in reception. In hospitals where patients are treated in single rooms, recovery rates are faster, patients are happier and get better treatment because doctors spend more time with them and there were far fewer cases of MRSA.

There are reams of research showing that hospital environments can either help or hinder a patient's well-being. Something as simple as natural light in a room reduces stress in patients. Now stress is a wildly overused word but in a person who is unwell, it's more than just having a bad day. It apparently produces hormones in the body that inhibit recovery, it decreases the function of the immune system and so increases the likelihood of picking up an infection. Patients who are stressed also feel pain in a more acute way than patients who are not.

American architect Roger Alrich, an expert in evidence-based design, pointed to a study he conducted in Stockholm, where some cardiac patients were treated in a room that had acoustic tiles in the ceiling while others were in a room without them. The patients in the quieter room got better faster, had fewer post-surgery complications and the nursing staff treating them were happier and more productive. In the future, one contributor said, walking into a hospital will be like going into a tranquil upmarket spa. In an era of trolley treatment and crowded corridors the reality of that sounded a little more distant than a blue sky.

In the first part of a new series, Basques, Berets and Bows, (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) presenter Kay Sheehy looked at the politics of style and in particular the fashion sensibilities of Maud Gonne McBride, Nora Barnacle and Lady Lavery. Gonne McBride believed that if you dressed for victory, victory would come - and the programme blew away her scratchy tweed, Inghinidhe na hÉireann image and replaced it with the far more flamboyant one. According to her biographer, Margaret Ward, this fabulously eccentric woman of independent means never travelled without trunk-loads of luxurious soft furnishings so she could make herself at home anywhere, and was accompanied on her long trips by a Great Dane, a monkey and a bird called Tweet Tweet.

Luke Clancy's new series, Sound Stories (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday), made for far less relaxing listening. The first part looked into how new gizmos are being developed to block out irritating noises. The second, longer part of the programme earnestly examined the work of musicians who use everyday noises as part of their work. This featured a wailing Portuguese artist who shrieked for a rather long time, accompanied by the background noises of New Delhi. It was difficult not to pine for one of those noise-zapping gizmos.