Abstract:

Background Information: Burn injuries are the commonest home accidents in childhood especially in low income countries. And has been leading to several outcomes including disabilities and deaths. The causes, treatment of burns and sources of information on the pre-hospital treatment of burn injuries among children play a great role on the prognosis of burn scores and should therefore be assessed.

Methodology: A cross-sectional study was carried out among the parents, guardians and caregivers of children that had any form of burn injury, at Sekou-Toure Referral hospital in Mwanza city, A well-designed questionnaire was used to obtain information among parents, guardians or caregivers of children under 13 years who have wound(s) due to burn injuries while excluding parents with critically burn children as the parents worried of their children’s condition.

Result / discussion: Five parameters were assessed that included gender, source of burn, aid provided prior to burn as pre-hospital treatment and the source of information. The most contributing sources of burns among children who merged in the analysis were fire (51.7%), hot water (43.5%), electricity (3.0%), and chemicals (1.7%) with a slight difference in gender where by male children about 54.8% were, and female children were about 45.2%. Pre-hospital treatment of burn was mostly done by using running cold water and honey by 40.8% and 40% respectively in most cases, and rarely some were using ice, sand and approximately 24% did not use anything prior to hospital treatment.

Conclusion: The study confirms that treatment fire and hot water are the leading causes of burns in childhood and therefore it’s important to put more efforts on preventive measures in home settings to protect children from burn injuries. This finding indicates that the prognosis of burns maybe affected by the methods used to provide initial treatment prior to hospital treatment as well as awareness on first aid prior to admission.