Clown visits may shorten the amount of time children spend in hospital

Children and teenagers with pneumonia seem to spend less time in hospital if they are visited by a medical clown, who helps to reduce their heart rates and encourage independence.

Visits from a medical clown, who may help children role-play or distract them during treatments, have previously been linked to reduced stress and anxiety among young people in hospital.

Now, Karin Yaacoby-Bianu at the Carmel Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, and her colleagues have specifically studied their effect among children who were hospitalised with pneumonia, which is inflammation of the lungs.

The team randomly assigned 26 children and teenagers, aged 2 to 18, with pneumonia to be visited by medical clowns for 15 minutes, twice a day, up to two days after they arrived at the centre. Another 25 children and teenagers received the same care, but weren’t visited by clowns.

The clowns sang and played music with the participants, and encouraged them to eat and drink by themselves. “They were initially receiving fluids and nutrients through tubes,” says Yaacoby-Bianu.

The team found that those who were visited by clowns stayed at the centre for 44 hours, on average, whereas those without clown visits were hospitalised for 70 hours. The results were presented at the European Respiratory Society congress in Vienna, Austria.

Doctors, who didn’t know which patients had received clown care, decided when to discharge them based on improvements in their breathing and heart rates, and their ability to eat and drink by themselves. The latter indicates that they could take antibiotic tablets at home, rather than the drugs being administered through their veins, says Yaacoby-Bianu.

The clowns probably aided the participants’ recovery via play, which can reduce blood pressure, says Kelsey Graber at the University of Cambridge. “Play can also improve young people’s sense of well-being, mood, their energy levels and sense of confidence and ability in their bodies,” she says.

The researchers should repeat the study in a larger group of children and teenagers with different conditions in other hospitals, says Graber.