To listen to the radio, click the link to the right.

Leicestershire’s mental heath trust and New Dawn Asian Mental Health have signed an agreement to support a new community radio station that will broadcast about mental health issues into the heart of the City’s Asian population. This marks the start of a five-year partnership to work together to raise awareness within local Asian communities of mental health issues and the help that is available for families from the NHS.

LPT is supporting the partnership by providing premises on the site of LPT’s headquarters Gipsy Lane Leicester LE5 0TD for Panj Pani Radio to develop its new radio station focused on mental health issues. Staff from LPT will also be regular contributors to the Panj Pani Radio broadcast schedule. Panj Pani Radio is operated by New Dawn Asian Mental Health, a not-for-profit organisation, which aims to bring communities together and ensure culturally appropriate services for Asian people suffering from mental health problems and their carers. “We want to reach communities in ways that are meaningful to them, through radio stations like Panj Pani, so that people are more aware of the help available and how they can use our services. By talking about mental health issues more openly we can also help people feel more included and accepted in their local community.” Panj Pani Radio is hosted within the Trust. The membership officer has been working closely with Panj Pani Radio and has helped develop a system whereby Trust jobs are being advertised routinely on the radio.

Audience:

1 in 4 people need support for their mental health during their life time. Our established audience is mainly Punjabi speaking, with some English, Hindi and Urdu speakers. Most of this established audience has some English, but feels much more comfortable with their first language. From our RSL experience, we believe that our daytime audience includes older people at home, housebound individuals, factory workers, and day centre attendees. The evening audience is a broader one, which we believe to also include young people from school age upwards.  Panj Pani programmes were being broadcast on EAVA FM 102.5FM for a year between December 2008 and December 2009. Now Panj Pani Radio will concentrate on running RSLs. These RSLs will be operated from our own new studio at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust ,Gipsy Lane, Leicester. However Panj Pani Radio is broadcasting on line (panjpaniradio.co.uk)  24/7 in Hindi, Punjabi, English, Gujarati,Urdu and other African laguages. Over 25 countries across the world tune into Panj Pani Radio every week and have more than 1000 hits every month.