Doctors are not allowed to sit on patients’ beds — at least in many British hospitals they’re not. Dr. Iona Heath explains in the BMJ:
Still trying to come to terms with the widespread banning of flowers from hospital wards (BMJ 2009;339:b5406, doi:10.1136/bmj.b5406), I learnt recently from senior nursing colleagues that sitting on a patient’s bed, by either visitors or clinicians, is now also prohibited, apparently in the interests of infection control.
Thus the emergence of a new British phenomenon (a sort of counterpart to an old phenomenon): The bed-non-sitting room.