Pearls From the National Burn Repository

The National Burn Repository (NBR) is an annual report produced by the American Burn Association (ABA) that summarizes the characteristics and clinical course of burn patient admissions submitted by burn centers in the United States (as well as internationally). This central repository summarizes demographics, injury information, outcomes, and quality data. These reports can be used to answer clinical questions, research questions, and to compare the performance of individual burn centers. Each report represents the 10 prior years of cumulative data. The 2016 report contains over 205,033 patient records from 96 U.S. Burn Centers and six international burn centers. The NBR is currently the single most useful reference describing the epidemiology of thermal injury in the United States, as well as for determining benchmark standards for clinical outcomes, such as mortality rate and hospital length of stay. With over 200,000 entries, this is a powerful tool for research, keeping in mind the limitations to any such database. In an attempt to generate new research ideas from the Journal of Burn Care and Research readers, the ABA’s National Burn Repository Committee has established a new series of brief articles, entitled “Pearls from the National Burn Repository” (or “NBR Pearls”). NBR Pearls is intended to present snapshots of interesting findings from the NBR and engender new research questions in readers that might become new, original manuscripts. Much in the way of Dr. James Jeng’s earlier series “A glimmer from the National Burn Repository,” published between 2007 and 2009 (1, 2), these articles will call attention to a topic, but may not completely elucidate causality, leaving room for future projects by other researchers.