Search

Burn services should undergo regular peer reviews within the national burn care network.⁴

Departments of anaesthesia should be encouraged to develop local key quality indicators relevant to their activity, which will assist in the process of supporting quality improvement.⁴

Research in anaesthesia for burn and plastic surgery should be encouraged. Staff members undertaking research should have received appropriate training.⁸⁴

When an awake fibreoptic intubation is required, patients should be informed. As part of a difficult airway follow-up, patients should be informed verbally and in writing about any airway problem the anaesthetist encountered, and should be advised to bring this issue to the attention of anaesthetists during any future preoperative assessment. The patient’s general practitioner should also be informed in...

Where alternative techniques are available, the patient’s preference must be fully taken into account.⁸⁶

Anaesthetic risks must be communicated appropriately to the patient as part of the consent process.⁸⁶ The RCoA series of leaflets on the risks of anaesthesia could aid this discussion.⁸⁷

There is a high incidence of ‘awareness’ under sedation and subsequent post-traumatic stress. The anaesthetist should obtain informed consent from the patent before any sedation is administered. This includes using descriptions of levels of sedation from the patient’s perspective.⁸⁸

Burn care services should have access to an appropriately sized, temperature and humidity controlled theatre at all times, with a maximum temperature setting of at least 30 degrees Celsius.^5,23

A burns theatre should be located in reasonable proximity to any service providing critical care for burn patients.⁴

A dedicated burns theatre should be adequately stocked and resourced. Theatre anaesthetic equipment and transport monitoring should be compatible with that used in the critical care rooms. Single use patient items are preferred, and protocol based cleaning is needed between cases.¹⁹