Medical clowns ease anxiety and pain perceived by children undergoing allergy prick skin tests

Abstract

Medical clowns significantly decrease the level of anxiety perceived by both children undergoing allergy SPT and their parents, as well as the pain perceived by young children.

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

“…Among the 28 included studies, 18 are randomized prospective and controlled studies and 14 of them have parallels groups design (clowngroup/control-group) [9][10][11][12][13]16,17,[21][22][23][28][29][30]34]. Half of the studies have a sample size of less than 30 patients per group [9,11,13,14,16,18,21,23,29].…”

“…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].…”

“…Working methods of clowns may vary across studies, as their professional training. 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].…”

“…Most of the studies measured the impact of the clown intervention on anxiety and/or pain. In most of the cases, anxiety and pain were measured with standardized and validated self-report or observer-rated questionnaires, specifically developed for children according to the age group [6,[10][11][12][13][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], or by visual analog scales [15,20,23,28] or crying duration [15,30]. Other clinical outcomes medical procedure were the length of time spent in hospital 29 or the systolic blood pressure [11,20,29].…”

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

“…The presence of a clown has been found to reduce the child’s anxiety (Dionigi, Sangiorgi, & Flangini, 2014; Felluga et al, 2016; Goldberg et al, 2014; Kocherov et al, 2016; Meiri, Ankri, Hamad-Saied, Konopnicki, & Pillar, 2016; Messina et al, 2014; Vagnoli, Caprilli, & Messeri, 2010; Vagnoli, Caprilli, Robiglio, & Messeri, 2005; Weintraub et al, 2014) and feelings of boredom, loneliness and sadness (Finlay, Baverstock, & Lenton, 2014; Mansson, Elfving, Petersson, Wahl, & Tunell, 2013; Meiri et al, 2016). Also, a few studies showed that a clown intervention is able to reduce anxiety in parents (Agostini et al, 2014; Fernandes & Arriaga, 2010; Wolyniez et al, 2013).…”