Development of nursing care guideline for burned hands.
Mojgan Lotfi, Ahmad Mirza Aghazadeh, Babak Davami and 3 others
PMID 32587709WHAT IT FOUND
A burned-hand nursing guideline was built from 40 papers, covering cooling, elevation, dressing, pain control, nutrition and early hand exercise.
It maps care steps but does not show they improve outcomes.
Key findings
01The review screened 2,230 records and included 40 articles.
02Emergency phase care themes include initial assessment, cooling, pain control, wound cleansing, dressing, physiotherapy and nutritional support, with hands elevated for the first 48 hours.
03Acute phase care themes include daily assessment, pain control, wound cleansing, dressing, physiotherapy and nutritional support.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The paper is a guideline development review, not a patient trial, so it does not show that the care steps improve hand function, pain, healing or complications. The authors state that some included quantitative studies had too few participants to generalise, and some qualitative studies came from different contexts. The authors could not access the full text of all selected studies. They also state that they could not use original language studies. The included studies had moderate quality scores, and many were descriptive or review papers rather than controlled trials.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that the guideline improves hand function, pain or healing. It developed care themes from existing papers and did not test them in patients.