Implementation and Maintenance of a Pediatric Severe Burn Guidelines Quality Improvement Project

Critically injured pediatric burn patients require specialized management, yet few verified pediatric burn centers exist in the United States. Many pediatric hospitals have resources to care for severely burned patients but lack standardized care guidelines, which improve outcomes. To improve the morbidity and mortality of severely burned pediatric patients admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit, we created a specialized burn team. We implemented Pediatric Severe Burn Guidelines, focusing on improving fluid resuscitation accuracy and providing timely nutritional support.

This investigation is of a 9-year (2010-2019) retrospective preintervention and postintervention study of the effect of the formation of a multidisciplinary burn leadership committee and development and implementation of Pediatric Severe Burn Guidelines. The primary outcome measures are increasing the accuracy of fluid resuscitation and improving the timely administration of nutritional support. The process measure is the percentage of time the electronic health record power plan was used for burn admissions with burn leadership review of the cases. Balancing measures are pediatric intensive care unit and hospital length of stay.

Preprotocol patients received acceptable fluid resuscitation 25% (5/20) of the time compared to 61.5% (8/13) of the time in postprotocol patients (P = 0.04). In postprotocol patients, there is an improvement in the timely placement of postpyloric feeding tube and initiation of feeds 48 hours after admission.

Extensive guidelines for standardized care require careful implementation and monitoring of adherence gaps. Creating a specialized burn team and implementing clinical guidelines standardize care leading to improvement in critical patient outcomes.