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Epidemiology

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Essential Burn Care for Non-Burn Specialists

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Abstract

Burn injuries are a major global public health problem given their high incidence and potentially devastating physical, psychosocial, and financial impacts on individuals, households, and communities. Most people who sustain burn injuries live in low- and middle-income countries and may not have access to well-planned and organized emergency and burn care systems. As a result, there is a high prevalence of people living with preventable morbidity (e.g., hypertrophic scars, contractures, amputations) in regions least able to provide rehabilitation and community reintegration services.

Although there is general consensus that the incidence of burn injury is decreasing globally, particularly in high-income countries, there has been little reduction in mortality rates outside of regions with sufficient resources. Given the critical role that systematic injury prevention initiatives and multidisciplinary burn care play in reducing preventable death and disability from burns, a detailed epidemiological understanding of the health, social and economic burdens incurred is important as a foundation for advocacy, resource planning, and benchmarking interventions.

Burn injuries occur more frequently and more severely among disadvantaged and minoritized people. With increasing awareness of the impacts of social determinants of health and health inequities more broadly, there are clear opportunities to promote restorative health justice with targeted interventions that prevent burn injuries, reduce their severity, and improve service delivery among historically disadvantaged populations.

To support an improved understanding of burn epidemiology for the aforementioned reasons, this chapter describes the distribution of burn injuries across and within populations and highlights several major risk factors amenable to target prevention and control initiatives, particularly those that are amenable to restorative health policies and practices.

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  1. Division of Trauma, Burn and Critical Care Surgery, UW Medicine Regional Burn Center, University of Washington, Harborview Medical Center, Seattle, WA, USA

    Barclay T. Stewart

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Correspondence to Barclay T. Stewart .

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  1. Department of Surgery, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX, USA

    Jong O. Lee

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Stewart, B.T. (2023). Epidemiology. In: Lee, J.O. (eds) Essential Burn Care for Non-Burn Specialists. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28898-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28898-2_1

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