Burns : journal of the International Society for Burn Injuries
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Burn patients have a highly variable length-of-stay (LOS) due to the complexity of the injury itself. The LOS for burn patients is estimated as one day per percent total body surface area (TBSA) burn. To focus care expectation and prognosis we aimed to identify key factors that contribute to prolonged LOS. ⋯ Progress has been made to update the conventional one day/%TBSA to better aid health care providers in giving appropriate outcomes for patients and their families and to supply intensive care units with valuable data to assess quality of care and to improve patient prognosis.
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The advent of consoles that deliver both interactive games and therapy may augment rehabilitation options in burn patients. The Jintronix software combines therapy-specific software and interactive gaming as a form of coaching and records patient performance on the Kinect® platform. Our objective was to determine the feasibility of a set of Jintronix games and therapy modules in hospitalized adult burn patients. ⋯ A Jintronix-based therapy demonstrated good acceptability and safety in hospitalized burn patients. Feedback from this study led to software modifications implemented by the Jintronix company. This feasibility study has informed the design of a prospective randomized controlled trial to determine whether a virtual-environment home rehabilitation strategy improves functional outcomes after burn injury.
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Burn injury in the elderly is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. It is not uncommon for biological age, or frailty, to differ from chronological age in this patient group and thus predicting individual clinical outcomes remains challenging. It has been previously shown that Rockwood's Clinical Frailty Scale, a global clinical measure of fitness and frailty in older people, can be a useful adjunct for predicting outcomes for elderly patients with burns >10% TBSA. We refine our previous work to investigate the impact of frailty on mortality of elderly patients with thermal burns of any size admitted to a burns unit and explore its role as a meaningful adjunct to the modified Baux score. ⋯ We demonstrate that Frailty Score can be used to independently predict in-hospital and one-year mortality for thermal burns of any size in the elderly admitted as an in-patient to a burns unit. We also find that the Frailty Score can be employed in combination with the modified Baux score to improve mortality prediction. We recommend that Frailty Score is integrated into the modified Baux score and used to focus burn care resources appropriately.
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The injury severity score considers burn size and inhalation injury in estimating overall anatomical injury severity. Models that adjust for injury severity score in addition to total burn size and inhalation injury may therefore be double counting the risk from these individual burn characteristics, and obscuring (or overemphasizing) the contribution of risk from each source. The primary aim of this study was to compare differences in the estimated mortality risk of burn trauma using the traditional injury severity score (ISS) calculation and the non-burn injury severity score (NBISS) to examine how separating out the risk attributable to the burn injury versus other trauma changes the interpretation and clinical assessment. ⋯ Our analysis comparing the use of traditional ISS and NBISS to measure comorbid non-burn trauma resulted in different interpretations for the effect of %TBSA on subsequent mortality. Our results suggest that the association of %TBSA with death can be obscured by the inclusion of traditional ISS. Therefore, we recommend using NBISS when constructing statistical models in this patient population.