EBA Educational meeting – Rotterdam

Lecture by Mr Ken Dunn

Cost analysis in burn care

No clinician in healthcare would deny that finance is an important area, but it is rarely the subject of discussion at clinical meetings or areas of research undertaken by clinicians.  The value of such work is that it brings vitally important understanding to the problems and consequences associated with change. These changes can be in many areas: staffing, consumables, the introduction of new techniques, service resizing, service closure.

The work undertaken in Manchester, UK has focused on answering questions concerning the cost of burn care and on modelling change.  The process initiated in 2007 was to establish a financial baseline against which changes could be evaluated.  The many steps in this process will be coming to a conclusion in the near future and already allow a far more profound understanding of the consequences of changes in burn care.  These developments fall into 4 key areas, each 1 of which will be presented separately:

• The financial consequences of change in terms of service funding.
• An understanding of the epidemiology of burn care demand and the geographical areas of high demand.
• The financial consequences of service reorganisation and the requirements for resilience in such planning.
• The financial consequences of introducing changes in clinical practice and evaluating its impact on service activity and funding.