Global Health: Burn Outreach Program

The objective of this article is to outline the elements of an international burn care outreach program in a resource-constrained country. The program has grown from a collaborative effort with Ukrainian physicians and healthcare officials. With this collaboration, a multipronged approach has been developed to address the gaps in burn care as discovered by years of interaction with the medical community in Ukraine. Contact was initiated with the burn unit of a single municipal hospital in Lviv, Ukraine. Patients with burn injuries were screened and selected patients were comanaged over a 3-year period by American and Ukrainian physicians. This comanagement included repeated evaluation both by telemedicine conferencing as well as annual trips with physicians from Boston, Massachusetts, traveling to Ukraine to assess patients in an outreach clinic and perform surgical procedures. In our first trip in 2011 we assessed 22 patients and operated on 5. In 2012, 38 patients were evaluated and 12 had combined surgical intervention. In our 2013 trip, 63 patients were evaluated and we operated on 22 of these patients. Multiple clinical research projects related to burn prevention and improving perioperative care have been initiated, presented at national meetings, and submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Our outreach program in Lviv, Ukraine, strives to improve overall burn care by a multilayered approach. These elements can serve as a possible template for additional international burn outreach plans as they can be customized for both large and small interventions.