A cup of tea or coffee can change
your life and your child’s life forever
Hot Drinks Harm
The expert team at the South
West UK Children’s Burn Centre at Frenchay Hospital, in Bristol,
treat thousands of children every year who have been injured by hot
drinks.
A scald is a burn injury caused by hot liquid,
hot vapour or steam and in young children, scalds are commonly
associated with hot drink spillages, water being boiled for drinks,
cooking, hot food and hot tap water.
Scald injuries cause pain and can scar a child
for life.
Injuries are usually to the head, face, neck
and chest.
Hot drink scalds usually happen when a young
child pulls a cup of tea onto themselves or pulls on an item (e.g.
a tablecloth) that causes a drink to fall.
Injuries are also caused when children run
into someone holding a hot drink or when they are themselves held
by someone who has a drink and spills it.
Hot water can cause a scald for up to 30
minutes after it is boiled.
Hot drink scalds can happen in seconds, often
before the supervising adult realises that the child is reaching
for the hot drink until it is too late to stop them.
Each year 37,000 children are injured in
burn/ scald accidents (Hospital Episode Statistics UK 2002):
- Of those 28,000 (76%) are under five years of
age.
- 95% of the accidents occur at home - more
than 50% in the kitchen.
- Hot liquids cause 70% of all thermal injuries
to children.
- More than 3,500 children have scalds serious
enough to require admission to specialised burns services each year
(iBID 03-09), of which 55% are scalds.
- That means that 180 children with scalds
caused by hot drinks are seen in hospital every day in England and
Wales.
- In Bristol, with a catchment population of 5
million for this type of injury, 740 new burns in children
were managed in 2009, of which 391 were scalds (53%) and 39% were
hot drink related.
With the correct treatment and management most
scalds will heal completely.
But even in these children the pain,
experience for the child and the family as well as the inevitable
costs are potentially life-changing.
A percentage of the scalds however will
require skin grafting and result in a need for life-long scar
therapy.
Hot Drinks Harm
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