Cervo M.1, Amadeo B.2, Cerboneschi M.1, Baroni L.1
1Meyer Children's Hospital, Rehabilitation, Florence, Italy, 2Gaslini Children's Hospital, Rehabilitation, Genova, Italy
Background: Burns are considered one of the top five causes of mortality in the European Union incident, and account for 1% of all deaths in children.
Over the past 30 years there have been significant improvements in the acute treatment of pediatric burns, which have led to drastically reduced mortality. These improvements have led to an increasing number of burned survivors with more demanding requirements of complex and long-term rehabilitation.
The scientific literature shows that there is not a standardized physiotherapy treatment evidence based that identifies which tools to use in the management of burned children in the acute stage and in the stage of scarring.
Over the past 30 years there have been significant improvements in the acute treatment of pediatric burns, which have led to drastically reduced mortality. These improvements have led to an increasing number of burned survivors with more demanding requirements of complex and long-term rehabilitation.
The scientific literature shows that there is not a standardized physiotherapy treatment evidence based that identifies which tools to use in the management of burned children in the acute stage and in the stage of scarring.
Purpose: The objectives of this study are therefore to search in the literature the physiotherapy treatments used in the acute phase and in the phase of scarring and investigate how's the physiotherapy for burned children is managed in two European pediatric burns centers, the Meyer's hospital in Florence and the Kinderspital in Zurich.
Methods: A systematic review was conducted in three databases (PubMed, Cochrane and PEDro), setting the following limits: English and Italian languages, year of publication between 1995 and 2015, pediatric population (0-18 years), any type of studies concerning physiotherapy and burns.
The clinical internship at the Burn Center of the Kinderapital hospital, has highlighted the physiotherapy treatments they use in the burned child; these treatments were then collected and placed in a checklist for comparison with those used at the Meyers hospital.
Results: 30 articles were selected: 40% of the studies had a RCT study design, while 33% were qualitative. Emerged 25 different physiotherapy treatments: some used in the acute treatment phase and other in the peculiar phase of scarring.
In the acute phase treatments include splint, mobilization and placements, considered more cross-physiotherapy treatments used in the acute phase for various diseases.
It is in the scarring phase that instead more peculiar instruments appear, such as, among the most cited, the elastic compression therapy and the contact media.
Among the 25 emerging treatments, the most innovative turned out to be the virtual reality and intensive training, topics that appear to be at the fore-front research in recent years, not only in the field of pediatric burns, but in different fields of child rehabilitation.
The survey revealed that there are no specific discrepancies in the two Burns centers, nor in comparison with the treatments that emerged from the literature.
Conclusion(s): 25 physiotherapy instruments have been identified. Both Burns centers are in line with the findings from the literature.
Current topics are virtual reality and intensive training.
Further studies will be necessary to investigate the efficacy in terms of scarring of all instruments identified.
Implications: These findings highlight the most employed rehabilitation procedures for the management of burned children.
Funding acknowledgements: The work was unfunded.
Topic: Paediatrics
Ethics approval: The ethical approval was not required.
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
