Elizabeth Vujcich¹, Karen Muller², Professor Michael Muller³

¹ Professor Pegg Burns Unit, Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, Brisbane, QLD, Elizabeth.Vujcich@health.qld.gov.au
² School Population Health, The University of Queensland
¹ Professor Pegg Burns Unit, Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, Brisbane, QLD, and ³The University of Queensland. Michael.Muller@health.qld.gov.au

The purpose of this audit was to review our data and compare outcomes to the data published from the recently published BRANZ data.  Data for all patients admitted to the Royal Brisbane Hospital(RBH) from 1^st July 2010 to 30^th June 2014 was compiled for analysis. The Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital Professor Stuart Pegg Adult Burns Unit has completed registry since 1972 of all patients admitted under the burns team. Since 1996, this has been an electronic record. The total body surface area burn (TBSA) was used as the primary measure of severity and summary statistics were used to analyse the data.

There were 1593 admissions to the Royal Brisbane Hospital adult burn unit, the ages of patients admitted ranged from 13 to 101 with an average age of 38 years with 13.6% of patients requiring an ICU admission. Percentage of patients admitted to the unit was 77% for patients with <10% TBSA, 12.6% patients 10-20% TBSA and 9.6% of patients were  >20%TBSA.  Of patients admitted to hospital 65% received at least one operation (ranges from 21.7%-71.2% BRANZ data).  The large majority of patients having a debridement and split skin graft as their definitive procedure. For survivors median length of stay for all admissions was 8 days. The in hospital mortality rates from published burn registry data ranged from 0.5% to 3.2% with the RBH in hospital mortality determined to be 1.3%.

Key Words

Burns Mortality