This episode of ICU rounds is dedicated to the topic of pediatric burn care.

Now we've talked previously about burn patients and some of the physiological challenges in providing

burn care to those patients, but it's important to realize that about 20% of burn victims treated at a burn center are pediatric patients.

Large numbers and the vast majority of patients, particularly with pediatric burns,

are not treated at burn centers, but treated in local emergency departments,

pediatricians, offices, and primary care providers.

It's my objective with this podcast to provide you with some

information on how we approach those patients and what patients are certainly appropriate for

referral to burn centers and burn surgeons. You would typically think that we're only interested

in perhaps the biggest and largest burns, but a lot of what

we've learned in caring for the largest and the most critical burns, we've been able to

improve the quality of life and the outcomes of patients with even the smallest burns.

I'm actually preparing this podcast of preparation for a talk tomorrow to our pediatric emergency department at Vanderbilt.

And as often I do with these podcasts is that I use them as archive teaching files for our residents to go back to and refer to at a later date.

The incidents of people who have burn injuries

are about estimated to be roughly 2 million patients a year,

and that's a very soft number

depending on what source of data you're looking.

I personally believe it's going to be much larger.

In most patients with burn injuries,

particularly when you're looking at all patients, regardless of age,

things such as arson, defective heating, manufacturing of illegal drugs.

...