Report SiUst – Società Italiana Ustioni (Italian Society for Burn Injuries)
The Italian Society for Burn Injuries (SiUst – Società Italiana Ustioni) is pleased to announce that its 24th National Congress and the 22ndMBC (Euro-Mediterranean Council for Burns and Fire Disasters) Meeting will be held in Tuscany in Spring 2023.The main topic will be: “Preparedness and Response to Mass Burn Casualty Incidents (MBCIs)”. Further updates will be available soon.
Our Society has recently been involved in several activities, namely achieving the following:
Reorganization of the website www.siust.org, now more accessible and containing more documents as well as content items and statistical analyses – free access
Online National Burn Registry
Scientific documents, as developed and adopted by our Burn Centres across Italy: nutritional protocol for burn patients; recommendations for emergency burn management during the COVID-19 pandemic; national recommendations for enzymatic debridement.
SiUst is also currently working on improving incident prevention; mass burn casualty incident (MBCI) management; post-discharge care for burn patients; recognition of burn injury as a rare disease and relevant exemptions; healthcare personnel specific training.
Regarding MBCI management, our objectives are the following:
Review of MBCI preparedness plans across Italy
Creation of a hospital network possibly supporting Burn Centres
Improving training programs for first aid healthcare professionals
Promoting the use of IT and telemedicine in MBCIs
Engaging the Italian Civil Protection, the Ministry of Health, and SiUst in a dialogue aimed at producing a national protocol to be shared with Burn Centres (first meeting with Protezione Civile to be held in Bologna next March 26th).
Regarding post-discharge care for burn patients, different rules about the free supply of drugs and prostheses for scar management seem to apply across Italy. Therefore, our aim is to achieve harmonization so as to provide all burn patients with full and free care for at least two years further to discharge. To this purpose, patients’ associations have been involved to help identify unmet needs.
We are also working on the recognition of burns as a rare disease and Burn Centres as places where rare disease treatments are available, namely for Burn Injuries, Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and Lyell’s Syndrome, Epidermolysis, etc. To this purpose, the Osservatorio per le Malattie Rare (O.Ma.R.) has also been involved.
Regarding incident prevention, SiUst is now promoting a widespread awareness campaign on burn prevention at home (80% of cases). We also encourage primary and secondary schools to engage in educational activities on fire dangers and alcohol misuse (responsible for 30% of severe burns) through the PRIUS Project learning material published by MBC with the Italian Ministry of Health and Istituto Superiore di Sanità and revolving around burn prevention for younger and older school children.
Moreover, we aim at improving the teaching of Burn Injuries within the University curricula of doctors, nurses and physiotherapists, as well as in different medical school PhD courses.
Finally, SiUst is going to call on young professionals to approach our medical specialty through scholarships and grants to be assigned to those who have stood out in the field of research and development of new technologies and care methods for burns.
President SiUst and Secretary General MBC
Dott. Antonio Di Lonardo