Pattern of presentation and management outcome of Pediatric burn patients at jumc: southwest, ethiopia

Abstract

Introduction: B urn is a skin and tissue damage caused by agents like fire, scald, electricity, sunlight and chemical or nuclear radiation. Burn injury is a major global public health problem accompanied by a high risk of mortality and morbidity with estimated annual death is over 310,000. Nearly 75% of burns in young children are due to scald burns. Infants have the highest death rates and large surface area of burn, inhalational injury, poverty, presence of sepsis imposes great factor for mortality and morbidity. It is very crucial for every burn institution to know the specific pattern, cause and management outcome of burn injuries for appropriate treatment and prevention of burn injuries. Very little is known about the patterns and clinical presentation of pediatric burn injuries in developing countries including Ethiopia. There is no pediatric burn study conducted in JUMC. Objectives : To assess the clinical presentation and management outcome of pediatric burn patient at JUMC from Aug, 31, 2020 to Aug, 31, 2022 Methods : A Hospital based cross-sectional 2 years retrospective study was conducted in JUMC. Data was collected from patients’ chart and were cleaned, coded, checked for completeness, content and quality of data collected supervised to ensure the quality of data and entered into SPSS version 26 for analysis. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression were used to analyze the data and significance is set at P value of < 0.05. Graphical presentations and logistic regression were used to present the result findings and to ascertain association. Results : Of the 92 paediatric burn patients admitted to JUMC burn unit during the study period, 62% (57) had sustained scald burn while 35.9% (33) of the patients are admitted due to flame burn. 60.9% (56) of the patients had a 2 nd degree superficial burn with lower extremity and trunk being the most common sites of burn injury. Around 14.1% (13) of the patients developed complication the most common being post burn contracture. A 13% (12) of the patients died while being managed. Larger number deaths were found in children < 5years and in a patient with high total body surface area burns. II Conclusion & recommendation : The common causes of burns in pediatric age group is scalds which are largely preventable. Children need due attention and care as they are easily exposed to burn injury when left alone at home