American Burn Association Consensus Statements

Nicole S. Gibran, MD, FACS* *From the University of Washington Medicine Regional Burn Center, University of Washington Medicine Department of Surgery, Seattle, Washington. See under consensus statements for author affiliations. The 2012 ABA burn quality consensus conference was underwritten in part by unrestricted educational grants from Molnlycke Health Care and Baxter Health Care. Address correspondence to Nicole S. Gibran MD, FACS, UW Medicine Regional Burn Center, UW Medicine Department of Surgery, Seattle, Washington 98104. Quality is generally recognized to have three components: structure, process, and outcomes. The American Burn Association (ABA) has a long history of trying to improve quality of care for patients with burn injuries. Since its establishment by Dr. Irving Feller in the 1970s,1 the National Burn Information Exchange, a nascent database relying on punch cards submitted by participating burn centers, has worked to drive quality improvement, regional healthcare planning, resource allocation, and research and prevention. Over time, this project evolved into the voluntary ABA project, the National Burn Repository (NBR), which now reports on incidence, etiology, and acute outcomes. The 2011 NBR Summary Report included more than 160,000 submissions from burn centers in the United States and Canada (and in 2010, Sweden). Like all data repositories, it has imperfections including missing data fields, but the ABA has initiated measures to incorporate a validator to minimize inconsistent data.