The assessment and management of thermal burn injuries in a UK ambulance service: a clinical audit

Duration of cooling with water for thermal burns as a first aid intervention: A systematic review

BACKGROUND

Cooling thermal burns with running water is a recommended first aid intervention. However, guidance on the ideal duration of cooling remains controversial and inconsistent across organisations.

AIM

To perform a systematic review of the evidence for the question; Among adults and children with thermal burn, does active cooling using running water as an immediate first aid intervention for 20 min or more, compared with active cooling using running water for any other duration, change the outcomes of burn size, burn depth, pain, adverse outcome (hypothermia) or complications?

METHOD

We searched Medline, Embase, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and used ROBINS-I to assess for risk of bias. We used Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation methodology for determining the certainty of evidence. We included all studies that compared the selected outcomes of the duration of cooling of thermal burns with water in all patient ages. (PROSPERO registration number: CRD42021180665). From 560 screened references, we included four observational studies. In these studies, 48% of burns were cooled for 20 min or more. We found no benefit for a duration of 20 min or more of cooling when compared with less than 20 min of cooling for the outcomes of size and depth of burn, re-epithelialization, or skin grafting. The evidence is of very low certainty owing to limitations in study design, risk of bias and indirectness.

CONCLUSION

The optimal duration of cooling for thermal burns remains unknown and future prospective research is indicated to better define this treatment recommendation.

A Weakly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition Machine Learning Approach for Emergency Medical Services Clinical Audit

Clinical performance audits are routinely performed in Emergency Medical Services (EMS) to ensure adherence to treatment protocols, to identify individual areas of weakness for remediation, and to discover systemic deficiencies to guide the development of the training syllabus. At present, these audits are performed by manual chart review, which is time-consuming and laborious. In this paper, we report a weakly-supervised machine learning approach to train a named entity recognition model that can be used for automatic EMS clinical audits. The dataset used in this study contained 58,898 unlabeled ambulance incidents encountered by the Singapore Civil Defence Force from 1st April 2019 to 30th June 2019. With only 5% labeled data, we successfully trained three different models to perform the NER task, achieving F1 scores of around 0.981 under entity type matching evaluation and around 0.976 under strict evaluation. The BiLSTM-CRF model was 1~2 orders of magnitude lighter and faster than our BERT-based models. Our proposed proof-of-concept approach may improve the efficiency of clinical audits and can also help with EMS database research. Further external validation of this approach is needed.

Common mistakes in the choice of topical agents for emergency care of burns: Experimental study

The aim of the research was a histological study of the tissue structure of experimental animals with burns in dynamics using various topical agents after the injury. Experimental simulation of burn injuries was performed on 40 rats, which were divided into the main and control groups. Depending on the nature of care provided, the animals of the main group were divided into subgroups: in the 1st subgroup a uniform layer of sunflower oil was applied, in the 2nd subgroup dexpanthenol was sprayed, in the 3rd subgroup prompt neutralization of traumatic action was performed with a gauze napkin soaked in water. Animals from the control group were not treated. The examination involved a histological study. The results confirmed the negative impact of applying oil to the burnt area as a means of first aid, which caused more pronounced degenerative changes of the dermis and its structures with the involvement of hypodermis in the pathological process, prolonging the duration of healing. As for the use of dexpanthenol spray for burn injuries, the histological changes of tissues did not differ much from those in animals of the control group, which did not receive any care. At the same time, histological findings of the tissues of animals treated with moistened wipes was characterized by less pronounced pathological changes. Histological analysis of tissue changes of the burnt area in dynamics objectively proved the effectiveness of water as the main pathogenetic element of emergency care in an experiment.