National Burn Awareness Day 2017 – greater impact than ever

National Burn Awareness Day is an annual UK campaign to raise awareness of the potential dangers that may result in a burn or scald injury.  This year’s National Burn Awareness Day reached more people than ever.

Here at the Children’s Burns Trust we worked extremely hard in the months leading up to 18^th October, to produce meaningful and easily accessible literature and resources to help a huge variety of people to embrace and promote the day – these included:

Hospitals and healthcare professionals, Fire & Rescue Services, children’s centres,  child safeguarding agencies, first aid trainers, government and community groups, commerce and industry, burns survivors and individuals.

Activity on the day started early with the first tweet being that of our Patron, Amanda Redman.  Amanda is filming abroad at the moment, but was still happy to support the day from afar using social media.  Our Trustees were also on hand to support – not least CFO Paul Fuller, who participated in two radio interviews – highlighting the danger of hot liquids and pointing out that a cup of tea can still severely scald a child or elderly person up to 20 minutes after it has been made.

Hospitals and Burns Services around the country held awareness raising events, both on-site and in their local communities.  Using posters and supporter boards carrying new National Burn Awareness Day branding, they pledged their support displaying the key message of the day –  #BeBurnsAware. Many groups also participated in local media interviews and many teamed up with local Fire & Rescue Services.

A representative from the Welsh Centre for Burns & Plastic Surgery at Morriston Hospital, said:

“Thanks so much for arranging for the National Burn Awareness Day resources to be translated into Welsh. As well as being distributed to different organisations outside of the Health Board, they were actually aired on prime-time Welsh language TV (S4C Heno) on the day. The TV crew were really pleased that they were available rather than use the English versions and I can imagine that the viewers will have responded well to them!”

As is the case with all charities and awareness campaigns, we couldn’t have achieved half as much impact without the role of social media. Thousands of people tweeted, liked, shared and posted the key messages behind the day.  One of our social media posts, showing how easy it is for a toddler to reach up and spill a hot cup of tea of coffee, reached more than 60,000 people in a 24-hour period. The official hashtag, #BeBurnsAware, reached more than 1.5 million people.

Many of our fellow charities embraced and supported the day – CAPT, Dan’s Fund for Burns, Electrical Safety First and the Katie Piper Foundation.

“I wanted to congratulate you on a successful National Burn Awareness Day last week! I saw so many companies and fire services sharing your messages.”  Electrical Safety First

Many of our corporate supporters helped – not only by raising awareness on the day, but in other ways as well – from sending a dedicated email to their database prior to the day, to producing a video animation for use on social media. We would especially like to thank Sprue/FireAngel and Means of Escape for their generous time and support.

To quote British Burn Association’s Prevention Committee Chair and CBT Medical Trustee, Ken Dunn:

“The vast majority of burn injuries are accidents….  If people take away one key message from National Burn Awareness Day 2017, it is that prevention and good first aid are the vital ingredients in reducing the number of burn related accidents across the UK.”

Children’s Burns Trust would like to thank EVERYONE who helped us towards achieving this in 2017, we’re already making plans to build on this next year when National Burn Awareness Day will fall on Wednesday 17^th October 2018.