BAPRAS Burn Care Advanced Course – Virtual, October 2020

Written by Ken Dunn on October 7, 2020. Posted in Prevention News.

Lecture delivered by Mr Ken Dunn

Changing epidemiology of burn injuries in the UK: effective prevention programs?

In much the same way as any experiment a baseline of activity needs to be established followed by a well-designed intervention with the measurement of any subsequent change. The difficulty with injury prevention is that there are so many confounding factors that may influence over baseline and the results and that interventions are not single events but have been proven to require sustained effort and thus funding.

Recent technological developments and the availability of social media almost all have brought about different ways of accessing the population and influencing the behaviour. These appear to be having some effect in the absence of any identifiable other reason.

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” ― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

Colebrook, L. (1951). The prevention of burning accidents in England and America. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 27(December 1950), 425–438. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1930087/

Keswani, M. H. (1986). The prevention of burning injury. Burns, Including Thermal Injury, 12(8), 533–539. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3454686

Keswani, M. H. (1996). The 1996 Everett Idris Evans Memorial Lecture. The cost of burns and the relevance of prevention. J Burn Care Rehabil, 17(6 Pt 1), 485–490. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8951534

Peck, M. D. (2011). Epidemiology of burns throughout the world. Part I: Distribution and risk factors. Burns: Journal of the International Society for Burn Injuries, 37(7), 1087–1100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.burns.2011.06.005