Burn Photographs: Can Burn Nurses Capture High-Quality Burn Wound Photographs? A Pilot Study

Burn wound photographs have become essential to multidisciplinary burn teams and improve patient care overall. This retrospective single-center chart review was conducted at an American Burn Association-verified burn center to evaluate the quality of burn wound photographs obtained by burn nurses who had received 1-hour basic clinical photography instruction. The quality of 15 burn wound photographs taken by burn nurses was judged by 3 skilled photographers using a 5-point Likert scale (1 = very poor, 2 = poor, 3 = average, 4 = good, and 5 = excellent) to evaluate key components of high-quality burn photography, including appropriate orientation, decent leveling, lack of a disruptive background, proper framing, and quality lighting. The proportions of photographs meeting at least average quality standards (a Likert score of ≥3) for the five evaluated components were 93.2%, 82.1%, 82.3%, 82.2%, and 86.7%, respectively. This suggests that when formal clinical photography instruction is given to burn nurses, standardized techniques are applied during image capture, resulting in high-quality, reproducible burn wound photographs used to augment clinical care, communication, and documentation.