The Therapy Beneath the Fun

Abstract

The study advances the need to incorporate medical clowns as an integral part of medical teams performing invasive procedures and to include clowns in all stages of the hospital visit when children undergo invasive examinations.

Feeling happy and carefree: a qualitative study on the experiences of parents, medical clowns and healthcare professionals with medical clowns

“…In other countries, for instance Israel, medical clowns are involved in medical procedures, and they cooperate closely with hospital staff. Studies have shown positive effects of these activities on the children, and it has been suggested that medical clowns should become an integral part of the health team (Kocherov et al, 2016; Ofir et al, 2016; Tener, Ofir, Lev-Wiesel, Franco, & On, 2016; Wolyniez et al, 2013). However, other studies showed a more negative attitude and suggested that the presence of clowns may interfere with medical routines and that children did not want a clown present during tests or medical procedures (Mansson et al, 2013; Vagnoli et al, 2005; Van Venrooij & Barnhoorn, 2017).…”

“…Children, family and healthcare professionals described the clown visits as moments of fun and distraction (Ford, Courtney-Pratt, Tesch, & Johnson, 2014; Ofir, Tener, Lev-Wiesel, On, & Lang-Franco, 2016). The clowns tailored their play to the situation, created a bond with the child and reframed the meaning of the medical procedures.…”

Humor and Laughing: The Benefit of Hospital Clowns in Pediatrics for Hospitalized Children and their Families: A Review

“…One third of the studies targeted specifically the benefits of the intervention of hospital clown for children [17,[19][20][21][22]27,29,30]. Over half of the studies reported intervention benefits of hospital clown for children and their parents [5,[11][12][14][15]18,[23][24][25][26]28,[31][32][33][34]. Four other studies have evaluated in addition the opinions of health professionals [4,10,13,16].…”

“…Thirty six percent of studies were focused on invasive medical procedures including venous blood sampling, intravenous catheter, burn, wound dressing, immobilization of injured limbs, wound suture and blood tests [15][16]23], medical forensic examiner (allegedly abused children) [5,[24][25], allergy prick skin tests 28, botulinum toxin injections 30, intra-articular corticosteroid injection 20, magnetic resonance imaging 17. Thirty two percent of studies targeted non-invasive procedures [4,19,26,27,29,[31][32][33][34].…”

“…Over half of studies of clown intervention lasted less than 15 minutes [3,4,12,15,16,21,22,25,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. For seventy one percent of the studies the intervention is realized by one clown at one visit [4,5,9,11,15,16,19,21,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] and in twenty nine percent of the studies the clowns intervention is realized by two clown at one visit [10,[12][13][14]17,18,22,34]. …”