Children’s Burn and Wound Care Foundation
Children’s Burn and Wound Care Foundation (CBWCF) was established in 2007 by plastic surgeon Einar Eriksen and Hans Petter Schjelderup. The foundation is located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and aims to establish burn injury centres for children in Addis Ababa, support training of local doctors and nurses and to engage in prophylaxis work for burn injuries. In recent years, CBWCF has aimed to implement competence-building training programmes in several African countries.
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Since 2008, Dr. Eriksen has been living in Addis Ababa and working at Myungsung Christian Medical Center and CURE Children’s Hospital. Here, he has provided surgical help to several hundreds of children and adults with burn injuries and educated both doctors and nurses in modern treatment of burn injuries and reconstructive plastic surgery.
In November 2008, Karianne W. Fjære, founder of Care4Burn, began collaborating with Dr. Eriksen. Every year since then, they have travelled together to Tanzania to increase knowledge and competencies in modern treatment of burn injuries and to provide treatment for children with new and old burn injuries.
Since 2011, Care4Burn and CBWCF have collaborated to raise the competence level in reconstructive plastic surgery and treatment of burn injuries, amongst national health care professionals at the University Hospital Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Moshi, Tanzania.
Dr. Eriksen and Karianne W. Fjære. March 2009.
Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre
Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) was built in the 1960s and is located at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Moshi, northern Tanzania. The hospital is a university hospital and educates amongst others doctors, nurses and physiotherapists. KCMC acts as a ‘referral hospital’, which means the hospital receives patients from both northern, eastern and central parts of Tanzania. The hospital has room for 500 – 800 hospitalized patients and has approximately 1300 employees.
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In 2016 the hospital opened a burn unit with 20 beds. The ward has a working programme for burn care with dress change every other day, and at the same time physiotherapy is given to all patients.
Nearly 40% of hospitalized burn injured patients at KCMC are children under 5 years of age. Often they are admitted due to injuries from open flames. Approximately 17% of the patients are admitted with third degree burn wounds. A large number of these patients are dehydrated when they arrive at the hospital due to massive fluid loss from the burn wounds. Over 50% of the patients develop sepsis in the burn wounds and approximately 26% of these patients die as a result of their injuries.
The hospital director at KCMC has set the objective to be the leading hospital in burn wound care treatment in the country.
Since 2011, Care4Burn has facilitated training in modern burn wound care and reconstructive surgery by Dr. Eriksen. This aims to raise the competence level for doctors and nurses in training at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre. Care4Burn offers financial support to the training, donates necessary surgical equipment such as Mesh-machines and Humby knives to the hospital in addition to sponsor treatment of children whose families cannot afford surgery.
