Which Burn Outcomes Do Patients Anticipate as Most Likely to Be Important

Burn therapies should focus on achieving outcomes that are most important to patients. The authors wanted to discover which outcomes newly burned patients would anticipate as most important to them and explored the association between demographic/burn characteristics and patient preferences. The authors surveyed 753 of 776 patients seen by our burn service from 2008 to 2013 during the initial encounter. Patients were asked to rate the anticipated importance of several burn outcomes including cosmetic appearance, resumption of normal function, and the lack of pain/itching on a four-item Likert scale (not important, somewhat important, important, and extremely important). The association between demographic and burn characteristics with patient’s views on the importance of various outcomes was explored with χ2 and nonparametric tests. Patient mean (SD) age was 30 (22) years, 58% were males, 69% were white. Overall, function was extremely important to 96% of patients, lack of pain/itching was extremely important to 85% of patients, and cosmesis was extremely important to 59% of patients. Cosmesis was extremely important to more females than males (69 vs 52%; P

Source: Journal of Burn Care and Research - November 1, 2016 Category: Rehabilitation Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research