Burn Care
By Dr. Weber
Dr. Weber describes care in Duluth for burns and how plastic surgeons play an important role in the care of skin.
The Burn Center in Duluth is a special care area. It’s located at what used to be called Miller Dawn Medical Center. It’s now part of a centre. It’s a specific area in the hospital that’s dedicated to caring for burns, has specialized nurses that have been trained extensively in burns, has all the dressing supplies and the equipment that’s needed to care for patients that have burns. At the burn center, we’ll see any burn from whatever cause whether that’s from a house fire, camp, fire, fireworks, anything that can cause you to get burned, and in winter, we also take care of patients that have frostbite injuries. Burns come in all shapes and sizes, everything from a very minor burn that doesn’t require hospitalization, which can be cared for and kind of an outpatient setting, which we have as part of the burn unit to the more extensive.
Burns that are going to require weeks and weeks of hospitalizations oftentimes even progressed into a rehabilitative state. It’s not only just the plastic surgeons rolling it, but the whole Burn Unit concept is that you have specialized nurses, you have specialized facilities that are all kind of have the one common goal to give the best care required to a burn patient. Plastic Surgeons are specialists and take care of skin, and soft tissue trauma.
How we do it here in Duluth, that essentially is that we work as a team. So we work in conjunction with the trauma surgeons, the trauma surgeons will be taking care of the acute injury, the fluid resuscitative needs, some of these patients will end up on ventilators, they’ll do all the critical care management. We’re trained to take care of the burn injury itself with the skin grafting that oftentimes is required. And then with that kind of the accompanying recovery and rehabilitation from the actual burn type of injury.
Every plastic surgeon that’s board certified that’s gone through their credentialing and training is going to have the skill set to take care of burns. Whether they decide to continue using that when they go into practice just varies from practice to practice.