Paediatric Surgery

Background:Each year, more than 7,000 children and adolescents aged 0-17 years are hospitalized in Germany due to thermal injuries.Treatment is provided not only in the 19 designated centers for severely burned children but also in specialized pediatric units as well as in non-certified hospitals, involving disciplines such as pediatric surgery and plastic surgery.Burn-injured children place high demands on acute care and surgical management.While there are no standardized treatment algorithms, an S2k guideline has been available since 2024.Although many hospitals contribute their data to the Burn Registry of the German Society for Burn Medicine (Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Verbrennungsmedizin, DGV), comprehensive information on the actual care reality has so far been lacking.This study provides an overview of the incidence and current treatment structures for thermally injured children and adolescents in Germany, based on an analysis of data from the past five years. Material and methods:We conducted a retrospective analysis of data from the German Institute for the Hospital Remuneration System (Institut fr das Entgeltsystem im Krankenhaus, InEK) for the years 2019-2024.These data comprise the cumulative annual statistics of patients insured under the statutory health insurance (Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung, GKV).All thermal injuries are coded both by localization and by total burn surface area (ICD code: T31).We included all inpatient cases under 18 years of age with burns or scalds, identified by ICD code T31.Each annual dataset provided information on age distribution, mean length of hospital stay, as well as the main diagnoses (ICD), secondary diagnoses (ICD), procedures (OPS), and DRGs of the cohort.InEK does not provide values smaller than four per year; therefore, very small case numbers are not differentiated in this analysis due to the nature of the dataset. Results:Between 2019 and 2024, an average of 7,530 children and adolescents with thermal injuries were hospitalized each year in Germany, corresponding to a total of 45,179 cases.While the incidence declined steadily from 8,322 patients in 2019 to 6,949 patients in 2022, a gradual increase has been observed since then, reaching 7,317 patients in 2024.Overall, 57% of the affected patients were male.With regard to age distribution, 13.8% of the children were younger than one year, 45.7% were between one and two years old, and 40.5% were three years or older.In most patients, the burn injury involved only a small proportion of the body surface.Specifically, 89.8% of cases affected less than 10% of the total body surface area (TBSA).Moderate burns, with an extent of