Synopsis of the 2013 Annual Report of the National Burn Repository

Most burn centers maintain some record or registry of the patients they treat. These registries typically include information on the clinical characteristics of the patients and their injuries, the care and treatment they received, and the clinical outcome. These records document the burn center's work and experience. They can be used to estimate the resources—supplies, personnel, space—required to provide care. They can be reviewed by the clinicians working there to discern imperfections in their systems of providing care and to identify opportunities to improve the structure, processes, and outcomes of those systems. They may also, in part, describe the characteristics of burn injury in the community served by the burn center. More than 40 years ago, burn clinicians envisioned the creation of a larger database of burn-injured patients. Such a database would be composed of data from several individual facility registries. It could provide a much broader view of burn injury and burn care in a larger geopolitical region than a single community. It could serve as the basis for burn research, burn prevention, public health, health planning, and advocacy at a regional, state, and even national level. This database then would benefit victims of burn injury, providers of burn care, state and national policy makers, and the public. Such a database was started at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s. It included a handful of burn centers. Over the years, that database was transferred to other entities, and in 2001, the American Burn Association (ABA) assumed responsibility for it, almost three decades after it was begun. By then, it had become national in scope and was known as the National Burn Repository (NBR).