An Observational Study of Knowledge of First Aid for Burns among Parents in Indonesia

Burns represent a large portion of injuries attending emergency departments each year, with children accounting for the biggest proportion. Appropriate first aid has been shown to help improve the outcome of burns and decrease the need for surgical intervention. Several studies outside of Indonesia demonstrate inadequate parental knowledge of burns first aid, but few evaluated interventions to improve knowledge. A period of data gathering from June to September 2022 was included the parents who have offspring aged between 18 and 12. This questionnaire was developed to achieve the objectives of this study and was based on others of a similar nature. A total of 102 participants were included in this study. In total, 102 parents (79.4% female [n = 81], 20.6% male [n = 21]) were questioned. Baseline knowledge was found to be poor overall; it was found that nearly 91% of parents did not know the first-aid procedures for treating pediatric burns. However, educational initiatives were effective in advancing this knowledge. When a child got burned, nearly 68% of parents knew to use cold running water, and about 70% knew to get help from a doctor. Cold running water being applied is an extremely positive sign, which can have the most beneficial effect on the healing of the injury. No other variables analyzed were shown to be statistically significant predictors of pre- or post-test scores (all P > 0.05). This study concluded that educational knowledge was effective to improve the parents' ability in performing first aid for burn care.