581 The Effects of the COVID Pandemic on Burn Clinic

Abstract Introduction The COVID19 pandemic has led to anxiety and fears for the general public. People were concerned about coming to a medical facility where the virus might be transmitted. Furthermore, stay-at-home orders that were implemented during the pandemic did not apply to clinic visits but contributed to people staying at home even for medical care. We hypothesized that there were delays in burn care due to the pandemic. Methods We queried our clinic data for number of clinic visits and new burn evaluations by month. Patients referred to our clinic from March 15, 2020 to Sept 15, 2020 were reviewed for time of presentation after injury. Days from injury date to clinic referral date and days from clinic referral date to appointment date were calculated. Patients who were referred but did not show and were not seen in our ED were not included because injury date could not be determined. Univariate analysis was performed. Results As seen in Figure 1, our in-person clinic volume decreased in April and May 2020 but rebounded in June 2020 as compared to the number of clinic visits for the same months last year. Similarly, in Figure 2, our new burn evaluations decreased in April and May 2020 compared to our new burn volume from 2019. However, our video telehealth visits increased in March and April then decreased in June-August. Conclusions Our burn clinic remained open to see patients with burn injury throughout the pandemic, however, clinic visits were delayed early in the pandemic. While we had an increase in video telehealth, it does not account for the decrease in clinic visits. This may be due to low enrollment in the electronic medical record encrypted communication platform and/or limited knowledge/access to the technology. Additional care may have been informally given via telephone but not well captured. Furthermore, burn care was delivered in the following months. Additional investigation is necessary to see if the incidence of burn injury decreased.