Burn Photographs: Can Burn Nurses Capture High-Quality Burn Wound Photographs? A Pilot Study.

Authors

Chiaka O Akarichi, Prisha Jonnalagadda, Katherine Bosler, Rebecca Coffey

Published in

Journal of burn care & research : official publication of the American Burn Association. Sep 18, 2026. Epub Sep 18, 2026.

Abstract

Burn wound photographs have become essential to multidisciplinary burn teams and improve patient care overall. This retrospective single-center chart review was conducted at an American Burn Association-verified burn center to evaluate the quality of burn wound photographs obtained by burn nurses who had received 1-hour basic clinical photography instruction. The quality of 15 burn wound photographs taken by burn nurses was judged by 3 skilled photographers using a 5-point Likert scale (1 = very poor, 2 = poor, 3 = average, 4 = good, and 5 = excellent) to evaluate key components of high-quality burn photography, including appropriate orientation, decent leveling, lack of a disruptive background, proper framing, and quality lighting. The proportions of photographs meeting at least average quality standards (a Likert score of ≥3) for the five evaluated components were 93.2%, 82.1%, 82.3%, 82.2%, and 86.7%, respectively. This suggests that when formal clinical photography instruction is given to burn nurses, standardized techniques are applied during image capture, resulting in high-quality, reproducible burn wound photographs used to augment clinical care, communication, and documentation.

PMID:
42758524
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 19 Sep 2026.

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