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Outpatient Burn Care

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Essential Burn Care for Non-Burn Specialists

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Abstract

Most burn patients can be successfully managed in the outpatient setting. However, the multitude of impacts that burn injuries can have (e.g., pain, acute stress symptoms, scarring), regardless of size, require well planned and organized care to achieve excellent functional outcomes. Successful outpatient burn care programs must be integrated into interdisciplinary burn center services either by directly managing outpatients or indirectly by supporting other practitioners who care for patients closer to their homes. Given that most people in the world live far from an interdisciplinary burn center where these resources are available, coordinating community-based care must be a core function of a regional burn center. Advances in telemedicine have allowed patients, burn providers, and community-based practitioners to connect like never before. Burn injury represents, in many cases, a chronic health condition that requires longitudinal management and serial assessment of patient outcomes and service delivery. Patient-reported outcome measures can be used to identify patients who need additional and specialized care and identify service delivery gaps as people living with burn injury recover over time. This chapter broadly discusses the spectrum of and components integral to outpatient burn care planning and organization.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  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

  2. Washington Research Foundation, Seattle, WA, USA

    Nicole S. Gibran

  3. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Nicole S. Gibran

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  1. Barclay T. Stewart
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  2. Nicole S. Gibran
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Correspondence to Barclay T. Stewart .

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Editors and Affiliations

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

    Jong O. Lee

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Stewart, B.T., Gibran, N.S. (2023). Outpatient Burn Care. In: Lee, J.O. (eds) Essential Burn Care for Non-Burn Specialists. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28898-2_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28898-2_16

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