The Burn Centre at Uppsala University Hospital accepts burns of all severities. Minor injuries are treated on an outpatient basis or in a plastic surgery ward, while more severe injuries are treated on the Burn Centre's inpatient ward.

Burn care - for care providers

Primary care or Burn Centre patient?

A burn must always be assessed as to whether it is epidermal, superficial dermal, deep dermal or full thickness. Epidermal and superficial dermal lesions should heal within two weeks and can thus be managed by primary care. If the patient is to be referred to us, an informative referral is requested.

What should the referral contain?

An informative referral gives us the opportunity to provide better care.

We would like to see the location, size, degree of damage and course of events indicated.
Please attach a photo.
Indicate the type of dressing applied.
To make it easier for us to get in touch with the patient, we would also like a current telephone number.

Referral to Burn Centre

Råd vid akut skadad patient; remissrutiner (pdf) (Advice for acutely injured patients; referral procedures)

Electronic emergency referral

(sjunet.org)

ATTENTION! Electronic emergency referrals are used after telephone contact with the burns on-call during the day and the plastic surgery on-call at other times.

Telephone: 018-611 00 00

Approaches in different care situations

Consultations can be made via the Burn Centre's clinic, 018-611 04 75.

Blisters

Our recommendation is to remove blisters, whole or collapsed, bearing in mind that this will cause pain to the patient! If pain relief is not possible, it is better to leave the blisters in place and refer the patient to the Burn Centre for further management.

Pain relief

Cleaning causes pain that must be treated. Local anaesthesia of the wound bed can be done with Xylocaine gel applied to the wound bed. Leave on for five minutes before cleaning. Upon application, the patient may experience a cold, burning sensation that quickly disappears. It is important that the patient has optimal pain relief between dressing changes. Paracetamol as a first-line option and can be supplemented with Ibuprofen, all according to the package instructions. If the effect is insufficient, opioid analgesia in the form of Oxycodone works well. If the patient has this, it may be effective for the patient to take it 60 minutes before the change. Citodon should be avoided as it has been shown to have a poor effect on this type of injury.

Anxiety and fears

Distraction of anxiety and fear is at least as important as pain relief for procedure-related pain in both children and adults. Soap bubbles and film (iPad and mobile) are good non-pharmacological alternatives.

Cleaning services

Only clean wounds will heal, including burns. Wound cleaning is therefore of great importance. Prevent pain, clean with water and soap at body temperature. NaCl is an expensive and cold alternative that causes vasoconstriction. Assess the depth of the damage. Take photos if possible.

Dressings

Initially, polyurethane foam dressings are recommended. There are a number of these, as this is the largest dressing group. The advantage of these dressings is that they absorb fluid and are therefore easy to apply, easy to remove because they do not stick to the wound bed and can be changed every five to seven days. When the wound reaches the proliferation phase, i.e. new formation phase. After about seven days, a thinner polyurethane foam or Mepitel wound bed cover can be used. Mepitel is easy to remove because it does not stick to the wound bed. The dressing can stay in place for up to 14 days but this is determined by the clinical condition. Ointment compresses are only recommended when the patient will be going to the Burn Centre within 24 hours.

Fixing dressings

Avoid tape because it hurts to remove! Instead, we recommend self-adhesive wraps or tube bandages. There are also different types of fixation sheets that we highly recommend, such as the image below.

Antibiotics

Initially, the patient is in the inflammatory phase, which means that the wound is oozing, sore, swollen and has red edges that are proportionate to the injury. These symptoms should not be confused with infection. Antibiotics should be prescribed when the patient has a fever and shows red wound edges that are disproportionate to the injury.

Tetanus immunisation

After a burn, you are more likely to get a tetanus infection. This is why it is important to be vaccinated against tetanus. Most people born and raised in Sweden have been immunised against tetanus as children. If it has been more than 20 years since you were last vaccinated, you may need to renew your vaccination.

If the burn does not heal

A superficial, uncomplicated burn should heal within two weeks. If it has not, the Burn Centre should be consulted.

Diet

A good diet is important for optimal wound healing and to reduce the risk of complications. Wound healing takes a lot of energy from the body and proteins are important building blocks in rebuilding the skin.
We recommend foods that are high in protein, such as eggs and meat. It is also important that the patient gets vitamin C, which is found in kiwi fruit, citrus fruit, blueberries and rosehips.

About our services

The Burn Centre is one of Sweden's two burns units. We admit patients with severe burns to our intensive care unit and ward 85 F2 around the clock. Uppsala University Hospital's burns care specialists provide round-the-clock guidance to Accident and Emergency Departments across the country.

We are a specialist clinic at Uppsala University Hospital and part of the Burn Centre that treats patients from all over Sweden. We are one of two units providing highly specialised national care for burns in Sweden. Here we care for patients of all ages who have suffered burns of varying severity.

We work in teams around each patient to provide high quality care. The team members are well trained and it is important to us that the care is characterised by skill, humility and a long-term approach. After emergency intensive care with the right surgery at the right time, rehabilitation is important. The aim of our care is to enable each patient to return to as normal a life as possible.

Minor burns are treated at our clinic, which is open on weekdays.

VO Plastic and Oral Surgery is quality certified according to SS-EN 15224 and ISO 9001.

The quality of care is continuously monitored using several quality criteria. One of these is the average care time per percent of burnt area. It is around 1.0 day, indicating that care is efficient and rational. Other quality criteria include a specialised emergency line, well-trained and experienced staff, pain management procedures and well-developed family support. A further criterion is that all patients with deeper injuries are operated on early after the injury with removal of dead tissue. The aim is to ensure that all patients requiring surgery can be treated within 24 hours of arrival.

Specialised care routines

The management of mental health problems is an integral part of every burns unit. In the order of 25-30% of patients have major premorbid psychiatric and/or substance abuse problems. Uppsala University Hospital has a separate unit for psychiatric consultation for "internal use". This unit is led by a highly experienced consultant psychiatrist with 30 years of experience. This unit is the formal point of contact in any situation where urgent psychiatric assessment is required.

There are established procedures for assessing the suicide risk in the acute phase of patients with an apparent psychiatric history who are admitted to the burns unit, as well as for assessing psychiatric status in case of doubt and for assessing the need for medication.

In addition to suicide risk assessment, crisis reaction assessment and assessment of various forms of confusional imagery, the majority of psychiatric problems are handled by the nursing staff, but with consultation psychiatry available in the background when necessary.

For patients leaving the burns unit for home, adequate contact is ensured, whether this means contact with the relevant county psychiatric service, with local substance abuse services or with local crisis groups.

Patients with a clear need for rehabilitation are assessed together with a defined doctor at the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Uppsala University Hospital. This person is then part of the rehabilitation group.

How do I know that the quality of care is high?

The aim of centralised advanced burn care is to provide the highest possible quality in relation to the costs that society chooses to spend on care. Measuring quality of care is therefore important, yet very difficult.

One reason is that the relatively few severely burned patients are spread across too many units in Sweden, making the performance of a single unit difficult to assess. Another reason is that it is difficult to find simple metrics that can be used for all patient and injury types. For example, the care of a small child who has scalded themselves with hot water cannot be assessed in the same way as that of an adult with a life-threatening widespread injury requiring months of ventilator treatment and repeated advanced surgical procedures. The most important measure of quality is, of course, the end result. Measuring this, as for other trauma care, is very difficult and requires registration in a large international registry. In Uppsala, this is done in the large American trauma and burn registry TRACS (Trauma Registry of American College of Surgeons), which is now used by 85 of the largest burn centres in the US to ensure internationally accepted quality standards.

Currently, on the initiative of the Burns Unit in Linköping, a common burn register is being developed for use by all burns units in the Nordic countries. Quality is primarily demonstrated through the maintenance of a set of agreed quality criteria or objectives that describe defined requirements for the activity, known as 'standards'.

Contact us

Subject area manager
Fredrik Huss
Head Physician, Associate Professor
Switchboard: 018-611 00 00

Burn Centre clinic
Telephone: 018-611 04 75
Fax: 018-55 39 19
E-mail: brannskadeenheten@akademiska.se

Updated: 2026-06-16