Burns

Abstract

During the past 20 yrs, as burn care has evolved as a specialty of surgery, survival and outcome quality have soared. Public expectations for survival and long-term outcomes are at previously unprecedented levels. These changes are the result of a number of advances in aspects of burn care that have occurred in parallel and have fostered increasing regionalization of this resource-intensive activity into fewer specialized centers. These are complex hospitalizations and can be divided into four phases: initial evaluation and resuscitation, initial wound excision and biological closure, definitive wound closure, and rehabilitation and reconstruction.