30 years of burn disasters within the UK: Guidance for UK emergency preparedness
Introduction
Following every major disaster there is a subsequent public and medical community outcry for better preparedness for future incidents. The National Burn Care Review Report published in 2001 recommended that all burn services have a major incident plan to put into action in the event of a disaster involving many burn casualties. This was followed up with the National Burn Care Group's “National Major Incident Plan for Burn Injury” in 2006 [1]. Within this report 25 major disasters involving large numbers of burn victims, which occurred throughout Europe, are listed with total number of fatalities and injuries however no detailed breakdown of the extent and nature of the burns sustained is documented.
Knowledge of past casualty profiles is essential in planning for future events. Although a plan for disasters of catastrophic proportions is important so as to be able to cope should such an event ever occur, requirements for activity on this scale is thankfully rarely necessary. Instead most disasters, as will be discussed, produce large numbers of injuries but relatively few major burn victims (burns >10%). By reviewing 30 years of burn incidents an estimate as to the number and severity of burns can be made for planning purposes at a local, regional and national level.
Section snippets
Methods
A review of pertinent literature published by the government, medical journals and popular websites was undertaken to ascertain burn casualty profiles for major disasters, data sources are outlined in Table 1. Disasters included were those which had occurred within the UK between the years 1980 and 2009, resulted in 10 or more casualties (including injured and on scene fatalities), and in which at least 1 casualty had sustained cutaneous burns. Where possible the severity of burn was recorded
Results
170 disasters with 10 or more casualties were found to have occurred during the study period of 1980–2009. Only 37 of these disasters resulted in any cutaneous burns, a rate of 1.23 disasters per year. These are listed in Table 2. Detailed documentation of disasters is scarce throughout all forms of literature and those that mention casualties often contain little or no information on the extent, type or severity of their injuries.
As expected the majority of the disasters in which cutaneous
Discussion
In this study of 30 years of UK history, a total of 37 disasters resulting in burn casualties were discovered (shown in Table 2). Documentation on type and extent of injuries in published medical literature or public newspapers is generally poor. 23 resulted in less than 10 fatalities; only five resulted in more than 50 fatalities of which only 2 had more than 100 fatalities. Almost all fatalities, when they occurred, occurred on scene at the time of the disaster. Additional deaths were usually
Conflict of interest statement
No author involved in the writing of this paper titled “30 years of burn disasters within the UK: Guidance for UK emergency preparedness” have any financial or personal relationships with other people or organisations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work.
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