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Should Flowers be Banned in Hospitals?
Reported December 30, 2009
(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Does flower water harbor potentially deadly
bacteria? Do bedside blooms compete with patients for oxygen? Do bouquets
pose a health and safety risk around medical equipment?
These are some of the questions posed in U.K. hospital wards – reasons to
ban, or at least discourage, bedside bouquets. But is this anxiety
justified?
Researchers Giskin Day and Naiome Carter of Imperial College London surveyed
the literature and talked to patients and staff at the Royal Brompton
Hospital and the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital about their attitudes toward
flowers.
Although a 1973 study found high bacteria counts in flower water, subsequent
research found no evidence that flower water has ever caused
hospital-acquired infection.
In the late 1900s it was common to remove flowers from bedsides at night, as
there was widespread belief that the blooms competed for patients' oxygen.
This was dismissed as myth when studies showed that the impact of flowers on
air composition was negligible and did not justify the labor involved in
moving flowers.
Southend University Hospital recently imposed a blanket ban on flowers on
the grounds that they posed a safety risk around high tech medical
equipment, but it could be argued that flower vases pose no greater bedside
risk than crockery containing drinks or food.
There is evidence that nurses are not in favor of flowers, partly because of
the amount of work generated. Interviews with staff in this study suggest
that nurses are more concerned about the practical implications of managing
flowers than about risk of infection.
Other studies report that flowers have immediate and long-term beneficial
effects on emotional reactions, mood, social behaviors, and memory for men
and women alike. One trial found that patients in hospital rooms with plants
and flowers needed significantly fewer postoperative analgesics, had reduced
systolic blood pressure and heart rate, lower ratings of pain, anxiety, and
fatigue, and had more positive feelings than patients in the control group.
Given that flowers and herbs have been used as remedies and as a means of
cheering up the hospital environment for at least 200 years, it seems
remarkable that flowers still tend to be treated with contempt in hospitals.
Giving and receiving flowers is a culturally important transaction, the
authors were quoted as saying.
Simon Cohn, a medical anthropologist at Cambridge University, was quoted as
saying that flowers have fallen victim to new definitions of care. He
suggests that the decision to ban flowers "seems to reflect a much broader
shift towards a model of care that has little time or place for more messy
and nebulous elements."
Cohn concluded, Christmas is a time for giving, so perhaps now is a good
time to think about care not as an outcome that can be delivered but as a
relationship that can be exchanged.
SOURCE: BMJ Christmas Issue, published online December 17, 2009 |
