2 weeks ago
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Not even a heavy downpour over South Brisbane could dull the spirits of the nearly 40 firefighters who crossed the finish line at the Queensland Children’s Hospital on Monday morning, bringing to an end an 800-kilometre, week-long ride from Bundaberg to raise funds for young burns patients.
While the annual Bike4Burns charity ride is usually completed by ultra-fit frontline responders from fire departments across Queensland, this year, Gold Coast mum Sam Burgess decided to jump in the saddle and test her endurance.
“It’s been [one] of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Burgess said. “[And] this has probably been the toughest day.
“But like all of them say, this is nothing compared to what kids have been through.”
Burgess knows that better than most. In 2015, her then-11-month-old son Charlie pulled a deep fryer of hot oil off a kitchen bench, sustaining burns to 36 per cent of his body.
“It’s all a blur but still somehow embedded in my memory,” Burgess said.
“I remember the crying, I remember the screaming, I remember the drive up [to Brisbane from the Gold Coast].
“I remember getting to the ICU unit and just sitting and waiting and waiting … it was just one of the most traumatic things that anyone could have to go through.”
Charlie spent 39 days at the Queensland Children’s Hospital, during which time he underwent 11 surgeries for skin grafting and dressing changes.
The director of paediatric surgery, urology, burns and trauma at the Queensland Children’s Hospital, Professor Roy Kimble, treated Charlie when he was first admitted, and has continued his care over the last decade.
He said Charlie was the first patient the department treated using new techniques to minimise damage and expedite recovery.
Under these guidelines, children with significant burns are taken straight to the operating theatre so that burns can be thoroughly scrubbed down to remove blisters and debris. The entire burned area is then covered with negative pressure wound therapy, a special dressing that “sucks all of the gas out of the dressing”.
“You get less swelling with the burn when you put negative pressure on, and you lose less fluid into the tissue,” Kimble said.
“By this whole process ... you end up with a burn not nearly as deep as it would have been if you hadn’t done all that, and as a result, the hospital stay is shorter, and you get less chance of requiring a skin graft [and] developing a scar.”
When Kimble started at the hospital in 1999, an estimated 27 per cent of children who suffered burns needed skin grafts.
With technological advancements and improvements in treatment and first aid, that figure is now less than 2 per cent, and more than 95 per cent of kids admitted with burns will recover without scarring.
“Twenty-five years ago, burns, you could fairly safely say, were still in the dark ages. We could keep patients alive, but the outcomes were not good,” Kimble said.
“Over the years we’ve produced an enormous amount of research in the area of burns … and now we actually have the best figures in the world.
“None of that would have been possible if it wasn’t for groups like Bike4Burns going out and raising money.”
Bike4Burns has raised over $1.1 million to date. These funds, and the efforts of the Children’s Hospital Foundation, help the centre treat more than 1000 children each year, advance research and acquire new technology to improve treatment outcomes.
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