In this micro-lecture, we discuss burns and the treatment thereof because at some point in a Paramedic’s career, they will come into contact with a patent who had some type of burn. Enrolled students have unlimited access to a rich library of learning materials such as this.
Welcome. In this micro lecture, we’re going to talk about burns.
Burns are very common in Australia because of the sun, barbecues, other aspects of social life that some … The Australian lifestyle. You have the house fires, industrial fires. It’s not surprising that at some point in your career, you are actually going to come into contact with somebody who had some type of burn.
Now burns are problematic on so many different fronts. First and foremost, there’s significant complications with burns. Complications with burns include airway problems, if they’ve inhaled the byproduct combustion of burns, which is not … If you come to a massive amount for an airway burn, except you understand that maybe there’s been some kind of compromise to the airway and some kind of side effect of inhaled toxins.
Other types of complications include pain. Patients will report significant pain. You don’t just have to come into contact with flames to experience pain with burns.
You can also have different types of dry heat as well. You also have to remember that infection is a huge complication of burns. The bigger the surface area that’s being burned, the more at risk you are of having some kind of complication with infection. Infection can actually kill your patients. It’s pretty important to remember that, and treat it with a clean film or the blood wrap.
Cooling the burn is extremely problematic pre-hospitally. Now the current guidelines state that we need to cool for 20 minutes, either with the burn gel, dressing or with running water or a mixture of the two. Unfortunately pre-hospitally, we do not have access to running water. So we tend to go with burn gel dressing.
Of course, managing pain is really, really important. You don’t want to cause any massive problems with breathing. For example, giving someone a huge sedative. At the same time, you do want to manage that pain appropriately. Try and relax the patient.
We also have to remember that shock is another complication of burn. When a patient burns themselves, depending on the severity, you end up with the movement of fluid from one cellular space to another.
That means that your patient is likely to experience signs or symptoms of shock. Think about what that means. That means that they might be pale or clammy, tachycardia, fast breathing, high blood pressure first followed by low blood pressure later on.
Of course, depending on how long the person’s exposed to all of these things, they might end up with hypoxia, anyway, that’s not caused by shock. They might end up with lower saturations.
Burns are extremely complex. Of course, we haven’t at the moment mentioned psychological affective burns, but people end up with long-term scar tissue on the face or in any area of their body that is exposed to the public, giving somebody a poor self-image.
That’s going to affect people long-term in terms of their confidence and acts of just daily living. As you can understand, burns are extremely complex. I hope you’ve enjoyed the micro lecture on burns. My name is Sam Willis, and I will look forward to speaking again shortly.
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