Childhood burn injury—impacts beyond discharge

Despite improvements in burn injury related in-hospital mortality over the past decades, evidence of post-burn morbidity means that burn injury continues to present challenges for both clinicians and burn survivors (1). Our 33-year study of long-term mortality after pediatric burn injury, found increased long-term mortality after both minor and severe burn injury (2). Our study used population-based linked administrative health data from the Western Australian Data Linkage System (WADLS) (3), a validated whole-of-population data linkage system that routinely links data from core datasets for the population of Western Australia. The WADLS infrastructure enables probabilistic person links to be created and maintained between the state’s population-based data collections.