Background

One of the central recommendations of the NBCR, 2001 was the need to create a UK National Burn Injury Database (NBID), utilising data from a variety of information sources. The NBID 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 Statistics (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).

A 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 National Burn Care Group (NBCG) decided to support the creation of the UK.NBID and fund the infrastructure to support it.

Aims of NBID

These are the same as iBID but with the added dimension of using NHS data sources to create a more complete picture of the burn injury problem specifically in the UK. This type of analysis also allows the iBID data to be validated, in terms of numbers of cases, accumulative days in hospital etc. The availability of national data about burn injuries severe enough to require assessment by, or admission to, general hospitals or specialised NHS services, will allow advances to be made in a number of areas:

• Prevention
• Service provision monitoring
• 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

Process

By collecting and analysing data from many sources it is anticipated that greater insight can be gain in the following specific areas than by just collecting data from specialised burn services by way of iBID:

• 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 and are not yet published.