A med student in Virginia is taking leftover wedding flowers and giving them a second life with hospital patients. Eleanor Love, a student at VCU School of Medicine, founded The Simple Sunflower, a service that regifts arrangements from weddings and delivers them to VCU Medical Center patients.
After working in a flower shop for a year and hearing about a similar program on the west coast, Love decided to start her own. She reached out to wedding venues and coordinated with VCU Health Volunteer Services to create new bouquets with the blooms and get them to patients. Not only do they bring smiles to those who receive them, research shows flowers have a positive impact on health outcomes for hospitalized patients.
“Flowers have been shown to improve healing and rates of recovery from surgery,” Love explains. “They've been shown, of course, to improve people's mental health and to lift people's spirits.” She says improving patients’ outcomes is “perhaps the most important impact I hope to make through The Simple Sunflower.”
Source: Sunny Skyz
NOTE: Flowers could be dangerous for some immunocompromised patients, please check with your hospital before bringing flowers in!