Medical clowns can help kids through treatment
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Children and teens with pneumonia who receive a visit from a medical clown to help slow their heart rates and promote independence appear to spend less time in hospital.
Visits from medical clowns, who may help children role-play or provide distraction during treatment, have previously been shown to reduce stress and anxiety among hospitalized young people.
Now, Karin Yaakobi-Vianeu of the Carmel Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, and her colleagues are specifically studying its effectiveness in children hospitalized with pneumonia, an inflammation of the lungs.
The researchers randomly selected 26 children and young people aged 2 to 18 with pneumonia to receive 15-minute visits from a health clown twice a day for two days after their arrival at the center, while another 25 children and young people received similar care but without visits from a clown.
The clowns sang and played music with the participants, encouraging them to eat and drink on their own. “At first they were getting fluids and nutrients through tubes,” says Jacoby Vianeu.
The researchers found that patients who received a clown visit stayed at the center for an average of 44 hours, compared with 70 hours for those who didn’t. The results were presented at the European Respiratory Society conference in Vienna, Austria.
Doctors, who didn’t know which patients had received Clown Care, decided when to discharge them based on improvements in breathing and heart rate and the ability to eat and drink on their own, the latter indicating they could take antibiotic tablets at home rather than being given drugs intravenously, Yaacobi-Vianeu said.
Kelsey Glover of the University of Cambridge says the clowns probably helped participants recover and lowered their blood pressure through play: “Play also improves young people’s sense of well-being, mood, energy levels, and their body confidence and sense of competence,” she says.
Graeber said the researchers should repeat the study in larger groups of children and teens with a variety of conditions at other hospitals.
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