Therapists in hospitals and in the community not only need training courses to strengthen their burn management skills, but also practical tools to help them address the issues they encounter along the way. As part of its efforts to improve burn rehabilitation for all, Sunshine Foundation launched in July 2018 the book Burn Rehabilitation: Theory and Practice, to share with other burn professionals the clinical experience accumulated over 25 years.
In 1992, Sunshine Social Welfare Foundation opened the first specialized burn rehabilitation center in Taiwan, thus extending the reach of burn care from the hospital to the community. Apart from providing comprehensive rehabilitation services for burn survivors, Sunshine has over the years shared its experience through training and capacity building with professionals in Taiwan and abroad, with the goal of elevating the standard of burn rehabilitation and offer burn survivors the best care possible. As we approached the 25th anniversary of our Rehabilitation Center, we began to examine how we could organize and share in a more systematic way our clinical experience accumulated over the years.
Originally envisioned as a tool offering broad guidelines for the rehabilitation management of burns, this project soon evolved into something much more complex: to organize in a comprehensive manner the clinical experience accumulated by Sunshine’s therapists over 25 years. This was done through a back and forth process between practice and theory, with Sunshine’s therapists constantly examining their clinical experience against theoretical knowledge and the latest evidence. The result is a highly practical book, which not only provides an overview of the basic burn knowledge and burn rehabilitation principles, but also looks at common problems and complications faced by burn survivors in the later phase of rehabilitation, and provides guidance on appropriate interventions to prevent or correct them.
This book does not pretend to cover all the clinical issues that one might encounter in burn rehabilitation, but all efforts have been made to ensure that those commonly seen in our practice have been included and extensively examined. This book will prove helpful in our efforts to build the capacities of physical and occupational therapists working in burns. We also hope that it will raise awareness about the importance of rehabilitation to achieve truly holistic burn care, and the place of the therapist in the burn team throughout the continuum of care, from the acute to the post-acute phases. With timely and proper intervention in the early stages, we can avoid many problems in the later stages, and thus help burn survivors preserve or regain the maximum of their functions, and return to a full and active life in society.
This book is currently available in Traditional Chinese. An English language version is in preparation.