European Practice Guidelines for Burn Care Based by the Copenhagen EBA meeting, September 2002 by B.F.Alsbjoern M.D., D.M.Sc.

Practice Guidelines for Burn Care

The present European guidelines for burn care are the results of an European Burn Association meeting held in Copenhagen, September 2002. The purpose of this meeting was to identify and clarify some European common practice guidelines in modern burn care. The meeting was announced in the EBA newsletter and as such open for everyone who had an interest in burn care.

The purpose of medical guidelines is to give a medical team some sound evidence for ensuring safe care of the patient. The present guidelines are based on scientific evidence and sound clinical experience. Guidelines should give the medical person references from which the treatment can be extracted. However, still the medical person holds the responsibility for the best treatment.

The medical person is free to choose what he or she feels is the best treatment. So, -guidelines are only intended to be aids for proper care of the patient.

Few items of burn care are here debated, but still other aspects of burn care need to be profoundly investigated, clarified and then recorded.

This is not a definitive work, but examples of topics for consideration and perhaps reconsideration.

A schedule for interpretation of the ideas has been:

Standards

• Accepted principles of treatment based on very high degree of clinical certainty
• Applied rigedly.
• Standards are rules.

Guidelines

• Strategies of treatment based on moderate clinical certainty.
• Should most often be followed and only broken if medical justified.

Options

• Possible ways of treatment based on personal clinical observation.
• Should be submitted future clinical studies