Burns and Electrical Injuries

Burns and Electrical Injuries

1. What the skin is doing before it burns

Your skin has two jobs. It keeps fluid in, and it keeps infection out. A burn is an injury that takes one or both of those jobs away.

So everything you assess about a burn comes back to that. How deep the burn goes tells you how badly those two jobs are damaged. How much surface area is burned tells you how sick the patient is going to get from losing that protection. Depth and extent are two different questions, and you're going to ask both of them on every burn patient.

There's a third question layered on top: was this patient burned somewhere that also threatens the airway or the heart? An enclosed-space fire and an electrical current don't just injure skin. They can close an airway or stop a heart. So your assessment order is scene safety first, then airway, then extent and depth, then the burn itself.