• J Burn Care Res · Nov 2021

    Adherence of Burn Outpatient Clinic Referrals to ABA Criteria in a Tertiary Center: Creating Unnecessary Referrals?

    • Spencer B Chambers, Katie Garland, Cecilia Dai, and Tanya DeLyzer.
    • Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.
    • J Burn Care Res. 2021 Nov 24; 42 (6): 1275-1279.

    AbstractInitial assessment and triage of burns are guided by the American Burn Association criteria for referral to a burn center. These criteria are sensitive but not specific and can potentially lead to over-triage and "unnecessary" clinic visits. We are a Level 1 trauma center with burn subspecialty care, and due to the COVID-19 pandemic, referrals to our multidisciplinary outpatient burn clinic required triaging for virtual care appointments. In order to improve the triage process, we retrospectively reviewed our outpatient burn clinic referrals over a 2-year period, 2018 to 2019, for adherence to American Burn Association criteria. We collected data pertaining to patient and burn characteristics, as well as treatment outcome, to characterize referrals not requiring an in-person appointment. Of the 244 patients referred, 73% met the referral criteria, with 45% of these patients being healed at the first visit and 14.6% requiring surgical management. Mean time from injury to first visit was 9.7 days (mode 6), and the average number of visits was 2. Overall, mean burn size was 2%, with the majority of injuries being partial thickness (71%), located in the hand or extremity (77%). There was a fairly equal distribution of contact (36%), flame (21%), and scald (26%) burns. This study highlights the nonspecific nature of the American Burn Association referral criteria. We found that pediatric and hand burns in particular were over-triaged and lead to "unnecessary" appointments. This information is useful to help adjust referral criteria and to guide triaging of appointments with the evolution of telehealth and virtual care.© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Burn Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…

What will the 'Medical Journal of You' look like?

Start your free 21 day trial now.

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.