Practice and thinking about the establishment and management of burn intensive care unit

Abstract

The treatment of critically burned patients has benefited from the development of knowledge and technologies that we got in critical care medicine of our country in the past ten years. The close-ended management model of general intensive care unit (ICU) and the idea of general ICU doctors who treat the monitoring of organ function and alternative therapy of organs as their primary tasks would affect the treatments for special critical patients hospitalized in general ICU, especially for those patients who were severely burned. If the burn wounds of patients are not treated timely, properly or in effective manner, the final treatment outcome would be affected. Therefore, the establishment of burn ICU is necessary. The development and close-ended management of burn specialty ICU has significantly improved the success rates, reduced complications, shortened hospitalization time, and increased the quality of wound healing of severe burn patients in the past more than 10 years in our unit. With the reducing of burn, especially severe burn accidents, the construction of regional burn center and burn specialty ICU locating in burn center is necessary. It can not only reduce the waste of medical resource, but also ensure timely and professional treatments for the patients in sudden fire accidents. At present, there is no consensus on the establishment and management model of burn specialty ICU, and further discussion is needed in practice.