Holiday hazards: burns in children during school holidays

Abstract

Background Paediatric burns are preventable injuries that can have a permanent impact on a child's health and wellbeing. The Burns Unit at the Children's Hospital at Westmead appeared to experience an increase in paediatric burn injury referrals during the school holidays. The evaluation of the characteristics of burn injuries in the school holidays compared to the school term may improve the effectiveness of burn prevention programmes. Methods A retrospective review was performed of all school‐aged children who were referred to our institution between January 2005 and January 2019. Patient details, burn aetiology, burn severity, length of stay and need for grafting were compared between burns sustained during the school holidays and burns sustained during school term. Results A total of 3020 children were referred to Children's Hospital at Westmead between January 2005 and January 2019. The mean number of burns sustained increased from 3.8 children per week during the school term to 5.4 children per week during school holidays (P < 0.0001). Contact burns were proportionally more common during school holidays than during the school term (26% versus 19.7%, P < 0.0001), whilst the proportion of scalds decreased significantly during the school holidays (43.5 versus 51.4%, P < 0.0001). There was no difference between mean age, % total body surface area, admission rates, length of stay or skin grafting rates. Conclusion There is a significant increase in burn injuries among school‐aged children during the school holidays. This highlights the need for targeted education and prevention campaigns in the periods immediately preceding the school holidays.

Identifying temporal variations in burn admissions

“…Smoothing was done to dampen the random variance in day-to-day burn admission numbers, but it also obscured the real impact of events and holidays. We believe this limitation is acceptable, as that was distinctly different from the goals of this study and data on the impact of those events already exists [17,[28][29][30][31]. Another limitation is the single center nature of this study.…”

“…Prior work on admission variations in burns has used meteorological seasons as markers of variation [14], but to our knowledge, no other study has evaluated burn admission variations on an hour of day basis, and very few have on a day of week basis or day of year basis [15][16][17]. The goal of this study is to characterize and graphically represent the temporal distribution of burn admissions and analyze how this distribution changes with total body surface area (TBSA) and mechanism.…”