Flowers Mangerton NSW: Same Day on Hospital Hill

What a Hospital Hill Order Actually Has to Clear Before It Reaches the Bed

Anna, qualified florist | fifteen years on the bench, and a fair share of those orders were headed for a ward

People assume the hard part of a hospital order is reaching the building. The building is the easy part. The hard part is the ward. Wollongong Hospital has wards that take flowers and wards that do not, and the one our florists have most often seen turn flowers away is the oncology and haematology floor. Send a get-well bunch up there and it stops at the desk, because the patients on that ward have immune systems that the bacteria in vase water can genuinely threaten.

Lilies are the other thing I steered people off the phone for years. Lily pollen is airborne, and it travels on a nurse's sleeve from one room to the next, so a lily arrangement in a general ward can drop pollen into a room two doors down where someone should not be breathing it in. Strong scent is its own problem in a shared room. A patient three feet away on a drip does not want a Stargazer in the air with them. For a ward I want roses with the fragrance bred low, or carnations, or lisianthus, built into a box that carries its own water so the staff are not hunting for a vase that does not exist.

So a Mangerton hospital order needs three things on it: the patient's full name, the ward, and a build that suits a bedside instead of a mantelpiece. Get the ward wrong and the flowers wait at reception until someone works out where the patient went. Get it right and they are on the table beside the bed within the hour.

How a Mangerton Order Gets Built and Out the Door

There is no warehouse on the Princes Highway packing these. The flowers are bought at market that morning and built in a cool room ten minutes from the hill, the day they go out. That is the whole point of the network.

* What happens to your order once it hits the Lily's Florist network, drawn out on the office chalkboard.

When we built the network back in 2008, one of the first calls we made in the Illawarra went to the woman who ran the flower shop on Central Road in Unanderra. She had been there for years before we rang. She knew every back street in Wollongong, and could find the hospital reception without having to think about it. That is still the shape of the thing. A bunch built from market-morning stock and standing at a Mangerton door by lunchtime has been out of the cool room about four hours. A box shipped up from a city warehouse has usually been packed for three days. Same rose, very different starting point.

What Goes Wrong on a Hospital Order, and What We Changed

I know the reception-desk dash from the other side of it. Years back, up north, I carried a newborn and a wrapped bunch into a hospital reception in 37-degree heat with about five minutes to spare and the baby screaming the whole way. So a hospital order that goes wrong is not an abstract thing to me. The one that taught us the most on this suburb is the order that arrives the morning the patient is no longer where it says they are. Someone books a get-well bunch for a relative on a general ward, and between the order going in and the florist reaching the desk, the patient has been discharged, or moved to a ward that does not take flowers. The bunch ends up sitting at reception while the family rings the next day asking where it went.

We changed how a hospital order is handled before it leaves. The florist now confirms the patient is still admitted, and which ward they are on, before the run rather than after. And we capture a mobile number on every hospital order, so when the person has already gone home the flowers can be turned around to the house the same day instead of stranded at a desk. It does not catch every case. It catches the ones that used to become a phone call.

After You Order

Once the order is in, it goes to the florist who runs the Mangerton deliveries. They build it that morning and send it out on the afternoon run. You will not see any of that happen, which is the part most people find hardest about ordering from a distance.

If something does not look right when it lands, ring us the same day on 1300 360 469 or email [email protected]. The same day is the bit that matters. While the florist is still at the bench we can fix almost anything. Three days later in a review there is nothing left to do about it.

A word from Siobhan, the other half of Lily's

Here is the thing nobody warns you about ordering flowers for someone in a hospital bed. You send them, and then you wait, checking your phone, wondering if they arrived and whether they were okay (we do it too, honestly). If you do not hear back for a while, it is almost never the flowers. People in a ward are tired, or asleep, or have left their phone on the windowsill across the room. The flowers are already there doing the job you sent them to do. Your part is done.

If you want to know what actually went out the door, the phone is quicker than email. One of us answers it, 7am to 6pm on weekdays and 10am Saturdays.

ABN: 17 830 858 659