In common with many areas of medical specialty, there is an acceptance by clinical burn care teams that the collection and analysis of accumulative data about clinical cases is necessary to allow progress in several areas of service development and delivery. The list of the historically available data sources and a brief indication of their respective limitations were considered in the National Burn Care Review (NBCR, March 2001 available from the downloads page).

In 2004 the UK National Burn Care Group (NBCG) funded the creation of the UK.NBID and the infrastructure to support it. In April 2005, the data collection and analysis began. The design was based on providing a means of recording what happens clinically following burn injury and to extract from that service management information that can be used for planning and commissioning purposes.

Aims
To make available a large volume of data about burn injuries severe enough to require treatment by specialised services, which will allow advances to be made in a number of areas:

• Prevention
• Service provision monitoring
• Quality Assurance
  
• Planning and modelling changes in service provision
  
• Service accreditation
• Audit and support of Clinical Governance
• Outcome assessment
• Epidemiological research
• Design of multi-centred clinical research

Design
One of the major concerns of the database design was to ensure that sufficient information was requested so as to provide the necessary data for the intended uses to be fulfilled, but to ensure that undue detail was not requested, as it that might increase the chances of incomplete and inaccurate data collection.  It has been emphasised at all stages of development that the Burn Injury Database was not intended to be an electronic patient record (EPR), although clearly it could form the basis of such a development in the future. The database was intended to be a record of the injury and some aspects of the process of inpatient care.  So as to give an indication of the quality and costs of care but also a crude indication of clinical outcome. 

The guiding principles of the database design were to ensure that the data remained:

• Acceptable:   as a dataset to all working in burn care
• Available:    from records covering the whole care period
• Measurable:  for every case presenting and being admitted
• Collectable: without undue effort
• Meaningful:  with few confounding factors
• Stable:  so as to be useful as a long term measure of care

Process
One of the central recommendations of the NBCR was the need to create a UK National Burn Injury Database, utilising data from a variety of information sources. The resultant design takes UK data from the international Burn Injury Database (iBID), which collects data from specialised burn services in the UK. To this is added data from the UK National Health Service Hospital Episodes Statsistics (NHS HES available from the links page). This is then augmented by periodic comparison with data from the UK National Burn Bed Bureau (NBBB available from the links page).

The first 2008 UK Report is now available from the downloads page.

By collecting and analysing data from many sources it is anticipated that insight can be gain in the following specific areas:

• Epidemiology of burn injury (iBID and UK.NBID)
• Cause of burn injuries and their preventable origins (iBID and UK.NBID)
• Burn service standards and the provision of high quality care  (iBCS)
• Cost and remuneration of acute burn care (Costs of care and PLC)
• Societal cost of burn injury sequelae (Burn Injury overall costs)
• Burn service optimal operation arrangements (Burn Service Design)

Each of these domains are dealt with elsewhere on this site in greater detail under the menu headings. Some are being constructed presently.