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