Demonstration of a Regional Burn Care System. Sub-Task C-1: Development of a Burn Injury Severity Grading System

摘要

Development of a Burn Injury Severity Grading System presents an opportunity to explore a number of topics which have a direct bearing on severity indexes for burns and on the uses and usefulness as well as the limitations of such indexes. Data which had been collected over a six year period on burned patients hospitalized at the burn center was reviewed. This allowed an analysis of the demographic, epidemiologic, etiologic, features of the burn population. In the previous work on severity indexes, the percent of body surface area has been the single most significant feature. There has been little work to evaluate the accuracy of estimates of burn size which are to a large extent subjective. Exploration of the reliability of burn size estimates and their effects on their usefulness in a severity index is discussed. These aspects of reliability and their effects is the substance of Part C. Using previously published indexes of burn severity and adding information derived from local data, a new improved index was developed which can predict with good reliability the prognosis for survival in hospitalized patients.