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The most common type of burn that we see
in the pediatric population
are the scald burns.
Sixty to seventy percent of our kids are scalded
by some kind of hot liquid at home.
Soup, coffee, tea,
most commonly at home,
but can be at parties and restaurants,
and it happens usually in the blink of an eye.
And parents think that they should just
keep the clothes on because they think
that if they remove the clothes they might actually
take off the skin with the clothes.
The unfortunate situation is that--
If it stays in the socks or the diaper,
or whatever is against the skin,
it will deepen the injury because it holds the heat,
so the clothing needs to be removed.
That's very simple to do.
And then the next thing is that the burn needs to be cooled.
And the cooling happens over a period of twenty minutes,
and either room temperature
or a little bit cooler than room temperature water--
not cold and no ice whatsoever,
as ice can actually make the burn deeper as well.
And if you don't have running cool water
you can also just use cool towels
and keep the burn covered for twenty minutes.
So the point of applying cool water for the 20 minutes
after your child is sustains any kind of burn injury
is to stop the burning process.
So by doing this you can actually affect
the outcome of this burn.
We've had children that come to the hospital
and minimal first aid is done,
and this burn actually may change
in the first couple days and become
a very deep second-degree or a third-degree
full-thickness burn.
In some instances we can improve the outcome of this burn,
by applying appropriate first aid such as cool water.
And it's symptomatic.
If you've ever burned yourself
and you put it under cool water,
it will immediately lessen the pain,
and it helps stop the burning.
So the result of that simple,
preventative measure will sometimes allow a burn
that may have been very deep
to actually not be so deep,
and it might heal a little bit sooner.
So it's simple,
and it can be done in most homes.
Children are very mischievous, they're curious,
and they want to get into everything,
and it's really important that we do not leave children
unattended around hot beverages, cooking,
around campfires, around hot fireplaces.
So it's really important to be monitoring your children
in these situations.
When you're cooking it's really important
to turn those pot handles away so the children
cannot reach them.
As children are reaching certain milestones,
they can reach that counter,
they can reach for that cup of hot coffee or hot tea,
and when they see that steam it's very exciting to them
and they want to see what's going on.
So it's really important to--
if you do drink hot water, hot tea, hot coffee,
to also keep this in some kind of container
where you can put a lid on that's tight,
and this will prevent you children from being scalded.
So when we talk about burns
and we talk about burn first aid,
we go on the assumption that the burns are superficial enough,
meaning they haven't burned deep enough into the skin,
that they're small enough that we can
control the pain of the children,
that they're in an area that's easy for them to dress
and for the parents to still handle that child,
and as long as all of those things are in place,
probably they don't need to go running off
to the hospital or emergency room at
one o'clock in the morning,
and it could be seen over the next twenty-four
or forty-eight hours.
But burn injuries are difficult to tell
at the time of the injury how deep they are,
And our recommendation usually is that
at some point over the first seventy-two hours
that they're actually seen by someone
who's a little bit more knowledgeable,
and has experience with burn injuries.