WASHINGTON - Many health care experts and consumer advocates want hospitals to pull the plug on a 24-hour television channel that broadcasts health care programs - and prescription drug ads - in more than 600 hospitals nationwide.

The Patient Channel delivers half-hour and hour-long programs to patients' rooms and waiting rooms that tell viewers how to recognize, treat and live with ailments such as diabetes, high blood pressure and stroke. Other offerings tell how to take medicines properly and tout the value of exercise and good nutrition.

Teresa DeVore, a patient this week at Wheeling Hospital in Wheeling, W.Va., heartily endorsed The Patient Channel, produced by General Electric Medical Systems of Waukesha, Wis.

"I enjoy it," said DeVore, 44, a licensed practical nurse. "They give you a lot of information in a little bit of time, and it's information a lot of people don't know." She said she'd watch The Patient Channel at home if it were available.

For now, the show's commercials are easy to miss. They account for only 18 minutes of the fledgling channel's daily airtime, though that will change as soon as marketers can sell more.

Dr. Bruce Dan, the channel's managing editor and a frequent on-air personality, envisions a program about depression, for example, that would lead naturally into commercials for antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil.

Drug companies "want get their message out to their potential audience just like any purveyor of a product," Dan said. "Direct-to-consumer advertising is part of the fabric of consumer advertising in this country."

That prospect outrages some, however, who say the channel's prescription drug ads try to influence patients at a vulnerable time. Some doctors worry that the ads could undermine their independence as prescription-writers. Medical ethics experts fear patients will assume that hospitals that offer The Patient Channel endorse the products advertised.

Those concerns have prompted at least one large hospital chain, San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West, to ban the channel from its facilities. A hospital accrediting group has chastised The Patient Channel for an allegedly deceptive claim and for what it calls blurring the line between programming and advertising. And Commercial Alert, a Portland, Ore., consumer watchdog group, has drafted a petition with the signatures of 37 physicians who oppose the station on ethical grounds

The controversies come as GE seeks to expand its viewership to more than 1,000 hospitals by year's end.

In Dan's view, the critics are overreacting.

The station is one of many available to patients, he argued. "If they don't like it, they can change the channel or turn it off," he said. He added that drug ads aren't the only commercials the channel airs.

Dan said the channel should be praised - instead of scorned - for helping to educate patients when doctors and nurses are often too busy.

Peggy Contraguerro, the director of nursing staff development at the Wheeling hospital, agreed that the channel helps educate patients and their families about their ailments. "It's an opportunity to learn if you're interested," she said. She was quick to add that the programs "in no way can replace the interactions that we have to have with patients."

Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer on social medicine at Harvard Medical School, vehemently disagreed on the issue of education.

"This is not patient education. And it's phony baloney to pretend that it is. This is advertising," she said. "It's designed to get that patient right at that moment to ask their doctor, `Do I need these drugs?' "

What's wrong with that, Dan responded. "If that conversation takes place between a doctor and a patient after having watched the channel, isn't that great to finally have the doctors and patients talking to each other?"

Dr. George Reisz, the chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, sided with Angell.

"The fact that it's in my waiting room implies to the patient that it has my approval, and that may or may not be the case. It compromises the ethics of the situation," Reisz said.

That's why Catholic Healthcare West, which operates 51 hospitals in California, Nevada and Arizona, won't carry the channel. HCA Inc., in Nashville, Tenn., which owns 190 hospitals in 23 states, is letting the administrators at each of its hospitals decide whether to air the channel, company spokesman Ed Fishbough said.

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, which sets health quality standards for hospitals, recently rebuffed The Patient Channel. At issue was a claim in the channel's marketing materials that said the programming supports hospital staffs' efforts to meet the commission's requirements for patient education.

Dan responded: "If that bothers them, we'll take it out."

Commission President Dr. Dennis S. O'Leary also noted that patients might confuse the channel's educational content with commercials because there's no clear buffer between ads and programming.

Dan responded:

"We think it's clear, but if they think it needs a little more demarcation, we'd be happy to do it."

Stung by the criticism, Dan questioned why Commercial Alert, the consumer group, hadn't targeted The Newborn Channel for similar scrutiny. The station has aired programs - and commercials - aimed at new parents in more than 1,000 hospitals since 1992.

"I've never heard of it until this moment, but we thank Dr. Dan for the tip," said Gary Ruskin, the executive director of Commercial Alert.

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For more information about The Patient Channel, go to www.patientchannel.com

For more information about Commercial Alert, go to www.commercialalert.org