European Federation of Healthcare Clown Organizations

06/11/2025

Don’t miss this brilliant opportunity!

The Theodora Foundation is sponsoring HCIM 2026 Scholarships for artists, cultural managers, and back-office team members from healthcare clowning organisations.

These scholarships are designed to support practitioners from organisations with limited financial resources, giving you the chance to attend the HCIM 2026 - Healthcare Clowning International Meeting in Lausanne, share experiences, and learn from leaders in the field.

🗓️ Application deadline: 15 November 2025
📌 Learn more and apply: https://www.hcim2026.org/scholarship/

🎟️ Get your HCIM 2026 conference tickets: https://www.hcim2026.org/registration/

Don’t miss this opportunity to grow, connect, and be inspired! 🫧🩺

30/05/2019

Bonjour from Brussels, dear efhco friends - the time is running to register for our efhco newsletter, if not yet done ....

📧info@efhco.eu + want your newsletter in the subject line and we will stay in contact! cheers 🙂

13/05/2019

Dear efhco friends around the globe,
we decided to leave Facebook by May 31, 2019!

And we would like to stay in contact with you all - and if you want to receive our efhco news, just drop us an email with the key words ' Want your newsletter' in the subject line: info@efhco.eu .

Smiling regards + looking forward to your contacts.

The European Federation of Healthcare Clown Organizations (EFHCO) was founded to protect and support professional clown work in a healthcare environment on a European level; in particular caring for hospitalized children, their families and other vulnerable and sick people.  

28/02/2019

Greetings from our Finnish efhco member Sairaalaklovnit.
Kinda small, but still nationwide organization & right now growing and super busy all the time.
A nice little video of an R&D project in 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA2QKv-fsus

This great project by the Ministry of Education and Culture enabled a new type of study and impact assessment of hospital clowns, encourages the role of artistic and cultural activities in health and social services, well-established in many wards across Finland. Hospital clowns and the HUS children’s Hospital, Helsinki joined the Ministry’s project to measure the actual impact of the clowns’ work on the smoothness of procedures and the experiences of the young patients.
Kiitos, Suomi 👋

A project by the Ministry of Education and Culture enabled a new type of study and impact assessment of hospital clowns. The experiment funded by the Ministr...

08/02/2019

Since 25 years the CliniClowns Belgium bringing smiles to our little patients and their parents - HAPPY BIRTHDAY to our efhco member !!

13/08/2018

Want to join Operação Nariz Vermelho in Lisbon or Oporto in Portugal?

Operação Nariz Vermelho is recruiting new artists to join their Hospital Clowns teams both in Lisbon and Oporto. You can apply from now untill the 9th of September.

To apply you should read carefully the procedures (yes, it is in Portuguese, but anyway, you should understand Portuguese in order to be considered), send all the documentation to the mail address audicoes@narizvermelho.pt and fill in the form www.narizvermelho.pt/doutor-palhaco-procura-se

To be a Hospital Clown you need to be over 18 years old, a performing arts professional, to have proven artistic performance and clown language experience and/or training.

You also need to be available to work twice per week in the hospital, to show a high adaptation level to the clown language and to work in pairs for 6 hours per day in an adverse environment. You need to show high commitment and strong willingness to deliver the organisation mission with strong creativity, to have interest in researching on the language and consciousness of the work.

21/06/2018

An abstract of the presentation given by Dr. Prof. Tine Faseur, professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, at the EFHCO Fundraisers Exchange 2018 in Antwerp last month.

Dr. Prof. Tine Faseur held an inspiring presentation about the Ethics in Fundraising. The outcome of her research among Belgium donors resulted in the following six ethics of fundraising.

http://www.efhco.eu/news/news-archive/june-2018-dr-prof-tine-faseur-ethics-of-fundraising

For more information about this research results or her other work. Please visit: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tine_Faseur

An abstract of the presentation given by Dr. Prof. Tine Faseur, professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, at the EFHCO Fundraisers Exchange 2018 in Antwerp last month.

07/06/2018

This study was to identify interaction strategies employed by medical clowns in culturally diverse dementia care settings.

As nursing homes become increasingly diverse, dementia care needs a wider range of culturally responsive strategies for individual and collective social interactions. While previous studies conclude that medical clowns have positive effects on verbal and non verbal social interactions, research is l...

14/05/2018

Katie Watson teaches us about improvisation and the importance of humor in healthcare. Here is a short clip about her method.

This is "Katie Watson - Medical Improv" by Northwestern ID&D on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

03/05/2018

An abstract of an article in Lebensart, 7th of April 2018 Austria, about the HCIM 2018.

What has the world to laugh about, the answer of the Japanes clown who was at the conference.

‘The World is created with differences. But Children are Children’
Eriko Kumagai, Clown at CliniClowns Japan

A crisis like the Earthquake of Kobe in 1995 also opened up hearts. Japanese people are usually quite shy, but have an immense heart in which there is always a smile. In appearance they might seem small and silent. But more and more the Japanese take on the message: It is ok to smile and to have fun. It opens up their hearts. As clown she notices that this change comes from the children. They inspire adults with their affective laughter. Also when the world shows differences, children are children. Families have problems everywhere. When you support them, they laugh everywhere. And that is catching, also for the hospitals staff in Japan.